Like most people, I’d heard of Guantanamo – the home of the most notorious prison in the world.  But I was intrigued when told a circus had gone to a side of the base almost no one has ever reported on – the side where military families, civilian contractors, support staff, and more than a…

June 18, 2013: The Obama administration released for the first time the names of 46 men it wants to detain indefinitely at Guantánamo without charge or trial.   June 21, 1993: Guantánamo’s Camp Bulkeley, an “HIV prison camp” according to a Federal judge, closes as the last Haitian refugees detained there arrive for resettlement in…

In 2009 I published a scholarly history of the Guantánamo naval base entitled Guantánamo USA: The Untold History of America’s Cuban Outpost.   It took six years of research and writing to produce and can be found in college and university libraries across the United States.  Yet today I confess that I do not understand why our political leaders…

June 12, 2013: A group of leading physicians published a charge to doctors working at Guantánamo to refuse participation in the U.S. military’s force-feeding program. In addition to arguing that the practice “unambiguously violates medical ethics,” they also labeled the detention center a “medical ethics free zone.” June 12, 1993: Haitian refugees being held at…

Today in 1993, Federal Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. of the United States District Court in Brooklyn ordered the closure of a refugee camp at Guantánamo that was being used to detain Haitians who tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In his ruling, Judge Johnson wrote: “Although the defendants euphemistically refer to its Guantánamo operation as…

An idyllic California landscape painting with a prison nestled in the distance greets the visitors as they enter the California Museum of Photography in the fourth stop of the Guantánamo Public Memory Project.  The traveling exhibition was curated by students from eleven universities across the country to raise contemporary issues, such as incarceration, national security,…

June 3, 2013: The government of Yemen issued a statement welcoming Barack Obama’s recent call to allow the release of Yemeni citizens who are detained at Guantánamo despite being cleared for release. The majority of the inmates currently being held at the detention facility have been unanimously cleared for transfer out of Guantánamo by a…