From prison, Egyptian political activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah bitterly writes, “People say, ‘Who can—for one hour—imprison Egypt?’ They say it even though everyone knows that Generals Tapioca and Alcazar and all the other generals will imprison Egypt for as many hours as their dreams of clocks with green hands dictate.”^[1]

Here in Guantánamo, the American generals succeeded in imprisoning an entire strip of a foreign island for decades, transforming it into its most notorious penal colony. Guantánamo the prison, as it became known, emerged as an eminently global project annexed to a global war on terror implicating the entirety of the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It is an implication often reduced to the population held captive: over half of the total number of detainees that passed through Guantánamo, over three of the nearly eight hundred men, were from the MENA region. Even such a measure is incomplete, tied to a geographic and arbitrarily bound ‘Middle East.’

A darker implication exists, not of its captives, but its jailers. What more deeply underpins the global nature of Guantánamo’s carceral project is its entanglement and exploitation of ‘local’ carceral regimes and practices around the world. Nowhere was this dependency stronger, or more effective, than in the Middle East, where imprisonment, torture, and police states rule the region. Guántanamo looms large in the MENA imaginary, integrated as yet another horrific prison tied to the region. In Guantánamo, too, the carceral practices and reputation of the Middle East loom large, though largely silent.

The story of the network of detention, imprisonment, and, above all, torture that often began in the Middle East and criss-crossed the globe is captured in the case of Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri. Al-Nashiri, a Saudi national of Yemeni origin, was first captured by the UAE in 2002 and transferred to the CIA, which ferreted him across a network of secret prisons spanning the globe in what became known as the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) program. For nearly four years, Al-Nashiri was tortured in CIA “black sites” in undisclosed locations before his transfer in 2006 to indefinite detention in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He is currently in his thirteenth year of pre-trial proceedings on charges related to the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole warship in Yemen.

In April 2023, I traveled to Guantánamo as a media observer with the MENA Prison Forum to attend the ongoing pre-trial proceedings of Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri. For one week, I attended court sessions under the strict supervision of a U.S. military escort at the invented military tribunal named “Camp Justice”—a complex of trailer units enveloped by barbed wire, a specialized military guard force, and constant surveillance. In the hi-tech trailer courtroom, surveillance and censorship mediated court proceedings: three panes of glass and a delayed audio feed separate the inner court from its external observers.

The week’s hearings, mediated as they were, provided a glimpse of the nexus connecting Guantánamo to the carceral regimes of the MENA region. Witness testimony by former FBI agents routinely cited the “Bodine memo,” a decades-old memorandum between the U.S. and Yemen enabling bilateral cooperation between both states’ security agencies for the investigation and interrogation of alleged ‘terror suspects.’ Through this agreement, the Yemeni Political Security Organization (PSO) worked with the FBI to detain, interrogate, and investigate so-called suspects. An underlying truth is left unsaid in court. The PSO, an internal security force, goes by another name in Yemen: the mukhabarat, the notorious secret police known to every state in the Arab world. That the PSO are a mukhabarat institution known for their political repression, arbitrary detention, torture, and collective punishment bears little weight in Guantánamo’s military tribunal. Nor does it bear much weight among Guantánamo’s predominantly American audience. Instead, foreign intelligence ‘partners’  are extolled by their U.S. counterparts, further entrenching the mukhabarat and their dictatorial rulers as legitimate state agents. It is a pernicious history ignored and marginalized in an American context, but pivotal to understanding Guantánamo within a MENA context.

MENA regimes, seasoned as they were, were effective interlocutors for surveillance, imprisonment, and torture under the auspices of the US’ global war on terror. The mere threat of rendition of a detainee to one of these states was an effective coercive tool for US interrogators. Black sites described in open court were apparently diverse in form, revealing—to the extent that information on the secret program has been declassified—the various degrees of collaboration, entanglement, and separation between ‘local’ host nations’ and CIA carceral architectures. Some sites were run entirely by local interrogators and detention centers, others collaborated with local security forces for protection, and others remained under exclusive American control on foreign territory. Here, red lights flash and our audio feed is cut often, cleaving us from the scene of the inner court, visible through the three glass panes. The locations of the now-defunct black sites remain classified, one of the torture program’s many afterlives.

Crueler afterlives persist. In Guantánamo’s military tribunal, it is the torturer who gives torture testimony. Psychologist Dr. Bruce Jessen, one of the two contract architects of the CIA torture program, was called on by defense lawyers to testify to Al-Nashiri’s years-long torture. The torture victim himself is silent, his lived experience presumed classified, and, on each of those days, absent from the courtroom.

It is an inversion of one of the most fundamental conventions governing victims and perpetrators, made all the more perverse by the methodical and sanitized terms Dr. Jessen employs to describe the varied techniques of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, sodomy, mock executions, and pure human experimentation. A clear attempt is made by the architects of the program to differentiate a modern science-based torture scheme from the base practices of the ‘barbaric other,’ alluding to the known torture regimes in the Middle East. It is a false binary that never existed. The very premise of the secret transnational torture program rested upon the participation of known ‘barbaric’ regimes.

For three days, Dr. Jessen gave his torture testimony remotely, refusing to return to Guantánamo, before retreating to his personal life, insulated from criminal accountability and indemnified by a multi-million dollar contract with the U.S. government. By contrast, Al-Nashiri returned to indefinite detention in Guantánamo, where, as defense lawyers argue and UN Special Rapporteur Fionnuala Ní Aoláin reinforced in a recent report, there is no “post-torture” reality for the remaining detainees.

Twenty two years later, time continues to stand still on the island. To enter the trailer courts of the US military camp is to step into a propagandized narrative of the past that should have long been discarded, yet continues to be litigated. It is, after all, a past still shrouded in secrecy. Kafkaesque military courts elongate and complement Guantánamo’s indefinite carceral regime. Thirty detainees remain, including sixteen eligible for transfer and three “forever prisoners.” Cataclysmic shifts globally—uprisings, war, counterrevolutions, and mass displacement—have had little effect on the carceral architectures of either Guantánamo or the Middle East, both of which have proven to be remarkably and destructively resilient.

Instead, the revolving door continues even after release. Many detainees released from Guantánamo to the Middle East are cruelly reincarcerated, at times by the same regimes that participated in their initial capture. In July 2023, news reports confirmed that Saeed Bakhouch, an Algerian detained in Guantánamo for 21 years without charge, was arbitrarily arrested upon his transfer to Algeria, held incommunicado, and now faces revictimization and incarceration in Algerian prisons. Elsewhere, UN experts warn against the forced repatriation of Ravil Mingazov, a former Guantánamo detainee held for 15 years without charge, by the UAE after promises of resettlement.

The ripples of the once global prison persist, spawning cheap and violent imitations elsewhere in the world. The transnational network of detention and torture underpinning its legacy remains largely secret. As carceral architectures are increasingly replicated and globalized, Guantánamo will continue to serve as a horrific model, intertwined as it is with the prisons of the Middle East, even as the name fades into obscurity. 

Back in Guantánamo, the generals’ clocks continue to tick, holding the island captive. 

^[1] An excerpt from Alaa Abd El-Fattah’s collection of writings, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (2021). 

​​Ayah Kutmah is a writer and researcher with a focus on prisoners’ and human rights in the Middle East. She is a former visiting research fellow at the Muwatin Institute for Democracy and Human Rights at Birzeit University, a 2020 U.S. Fulbright recipient to the occupied West Bank, and previously worked with Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association based in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt). She currently works on a defense team representing a detainee held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. 

† Nothing the author has written represents the opinion of the U.S. Department of Defense, nor should it be read in any way to confirm or deny any classified information.