SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
For a reporter trying to track down a story, sometimes getting to a place is as circuitous and bizarre as the story itself, even if that place isn't too far from Florida.
SACHA PFEIFFER, BYLINE: It is so arduous to get to Guantanamo.
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DETROW: Sacha Pfeiffer from NPR's investigations team has covered the U.S. naval base and military prison at Guantanamo for years.
PFEIFFER: The main way you do it is you have to go to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. For some reason, you're required to get there about 3 1/2 to four hours early. You sit in this itty-bitty little lounge. Oftentimes the flights are delayed or canceled. After a three-hour flight, you land in Guantanamo.
UNIDENTIFIED PILOT: Flight attendants prepare for arrival. Cross check, please.
PFEIFFER: You hear the pilot or the flight attendant come on and say something like...
UNIDENTIFIED FLIGHT ATTENDANT: We'd like to welcome everyone to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Pearl of the Antilles. We'd like to ask everybody to please remain in your seats...
PFEIFFER: Then you have to take a ferry to a van.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: You need to turn it off when we walk off the plane.
PFEIFFER: OK.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: And then we'll turn it back on when we get in the van.
PFEIFFER: And then it takes you to what used to be these tents that reporters were required to sleep in.
I'm now in the room I've stayed in for this week.
These were these very primitive group tents subdivided into little squares with wood, with a simple cot...
A simple plastic chair and a tiny two-drawer bureau. There's some nails on the wall where I've been hanging clothes when they need to dry or not get wrinkly.
Heavily, heavily air conditioned because it is so moist and mildewy in this Caribbean climate that if they don't stay air conditioned, they get filled with mold. The bathrooms were always moldy. Also, these large rodents called banana rats would sometimes try to get into the tents.
DETROW: How large of a rodent are we talking about?
PFEIFFER: I looked this up for you this morning. Banana rats can grow up to 2 feet long and weigh 19 pounds.
DETROW: A 19-pound rat? Like...
PFEIFFER: On the island.
DETROW: Oh, wow.
PFEIFFER: You do not want that in your tent.
DETROW: We should say for the record that, more recently, journalists have been staying in a hotel at Guantanamo. But that in itself might seem like an oddity to a first-time visitor.
PFEIFFER: One of the things that most struck me when I went down there is that people think Guantanamo, and they think torture...
DETROW: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: ...And terrorism. But remember, this is a naval base that has been around for more than a century. So there is a McDonald's. There's a Subway sandwich shop. There's a hospital and a school and a Tiki bar and an Irish bar. A lot of the military people assigned there seem to be having a great time. They're spearfishing and scuba diving and sailing, and it just was such a shock.
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DETROW: Twenty years ago, at the height of the war on terror, Guantanamo occupied a vivid place in the American imagination. Now it can feel like a relic of an earlier age, but not to reporters like Sacha, who still have a surprising amount of news from the base to cover. The alleged plotters of the 9/11 attacks, like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, are still there awaiting trial. There's an ongoing legal fight over plea deals for those remaining prisoners, plea deals that were offered last year but then dramatically rescinded. And now, President Trump has started sending undocumented migrants to the base as a stopover in his efforts to increase deportations. So today, for our weekly Reporter's Notebook segment, we wanted to pull back the curtain on the process of covering one of the most notorious and beguiling places on the planet - Guantanamo Bay.
Let's talk about the day-to-day reporting experience. You've arrived. The air conditioning works in the tent. You've made it to the courtroom. Do you physically go to a courtroom? Like, what do you physically do as a reporter at that point? And how many people are you able to directly talk to?
PFEIFFER: You do physically go to a courtroom when hearings are happening, although oftentimes they close them, and suddenly you can't go. You can record and videotape almost nothing and whatever you do has to be approved by security officials. There is a glass wall between the spectator viewing gallery and the courtroom area. Like, you can see Khalid Shaikh Mohammed through the glass, but then you're in this viewing gallery with reporters and victim family members. You're watching and listening to the proceedings on a delay. And there is something people call this hockey light, where if the government thinks something confidential has been said, the light goes on, the video and audio to the courtroom is cut to the spectator gallery. So it's very limiting.
DETROW: What is it like to sit in a room with people whose family members died on 9/11 when they see Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who allegedly plotted out the entire attack, and they're in physically the same space with him? Is there a reaction? Can you feel it in the room? Is there tension? Is there anger?
PFEIFFER: You know, I'm sorry to say that so few victim family members tend to go down now that there aren't a lot of them. Sort of the minders, the guards also basically don't want reporters to talk to victim family members at least in the courtroom. But I spent a lot of time talking with them outside the courtroom by phone. I would say the family members fall in generally three camps. There are some that just want to keep this 9/11 case trying to go to trial, and they would like to see these men put to death. There's also a belief that a trial will probably never happen. So there's a group of family members who think - just settle the cases with plea deals. Let them plead guilty and spend life in prison. Move on.
There's a middle group that thinks they're very dissatisfied with plea deals, but they feel that at least if the government would be willing to turn over all the confidential material it's gathered in the course of the case, then a plea deal might feel more satisfying. One family member who has come to believe that plea deals is the only way to resolve the 9/11 case is Terry Rockefeller. She lives in Massachusetts, and her only sibling, her younger sister Laura, died in the World Trade Center collapse.
TERRY ROCKEFELLER: I thought it would be an achievement to put an end to the really totally failed military commission system by finally concluding the cases through pretrial agreements. But this is not a legal criminal trial. This is a political trial down here.
DETROW: How many of them, if any of them, expect in one way or another, there's going to be closure and finality and a set resolution to this?
PFEIFFER: I think many of them are now concluding that it may never resolve, that they're going to, one by one, watch these men start to die in prison, never having been tried, never having been convicted, and in the eyes of the law, they'll be legally innocent. And that obviously is very dissatisfying. I mean, they're tired. They're worn out. They feel really jerked around. They feel like they cannot believe the government has allowed this to go on as long as it has. So although they may disagree on how to resolve the 9/11 case, all of them share this exhaustion, this frustration, this disgust with the government.
DETROW: What to you - having gone there several times, having reported on this, what to you was the strangest aspect of this whole setup?
PFEIFFER: I think the futility of it. Someone wrote an article in The Atlantic a while back that said this about the futility of Guantanamo - the quote was, "Guantanamo was where you send a mass murderer if you want him to die of old age while those prosecuting him drown in paperwork." So I've tried to convey that futility, but every time I do a story, I get listener comments that say - Guantanamo's still open? The 9/11 case hasn't gone to trial? So it's a reminder how hard it is to convey how dysfunctional it is down there. Someone I spoke with who really gets across the futility of what's going on and who also told me she's come to believe that Guantanamo may never close is Karen Greenberg. She's with Fordham Law school, and she's followed Guantanamo for years.
KAREN GREENBERG: It's always been one step forward, several steps backwards. It's been disappointment after disappointment after disappointment after disappointment since the very opening of Guantanamo. It's a tremendous failure of leadership and has been over and over and over again.
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DETROW: Sacha, as you talked about Guantanamo Bay, it's clear that it has many layers. The prison is just one part of this operation there. And another part of the base has been in the news lately. President Trump announced plans to send as many as 30,000 migrants there as a stopover point throughout the process of being deported from the U.S. So let's talk about that for a minute, and let's clear a few things up because when President Trump is talking about sending people in the country illegally to Guantanamo Bay, he is not talking about what we have been talking about, right? He's talking about a separate, totally different part of this base.
PFEIFFER: Exactly. They are not talking about taking migrants and putting them behind bars with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. In fact, the Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has made that clear. Where they want to send them is to a separate area of the naval base at Guantanamo that for decades has had a migrant detention center because the Coast Guard down there often interdicts migrants at sea - people from Haiti, Cuba, sometimes the Dominican Republic who flee their countries on boats and get picked up in the waters around Guantanamo. That's where they're - the Trump administration is talking about putting migrants.
DETROW: You know, it seems like there's probably a really clear political benefit to shorthand saying, we're going to send them to Guantanamo - right? - even though, again, talking...
PFEIFFER: Yes.
DETROW: ...Apples and oranges.
PFEIFFER: That's a great point because there are plenty of places we could put these people in the United States, big, wide-open spaces in the West and the Midwest. But I've talked to some people - some lawyers this week who believe there is a macho symbolism to sending migrants to Guantanamo the Trump administration likes. It makes the migrants look like bad guys. They're kind of affiliated with terrorists, even though they won't be housed with terrorists. And so there's a message they're trying to send by sending them to Gitmo.
DETROW: There is some precedent here though - right? - because I feel like you saw the initial headlines, you thought, wow, another big, unprecedented Trump move. But yet, we've been here before. Migrants have been housed there before.
PFEIFFER: That's true. As we've talked about, Guantanamo has, for decades, had an area where migrants can be held. In 1994, at its height, the Defense Department says 46,000 migrants were being housed at Guantanamo, mostly Haitian and Cuban. So it's happened. They have had more than 30,000 people there, although there's been criticism that it became sort of a tent city that was not fair to the people staying there. So really, it comes down to whether the United States wants to incur this cost.
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DETROW: You have mentioned a few times already in the conversation that this has been largely forgotten by so many people. Why has this not been forgotten by you? Why is this, to you, a topic you want to keep returning to and keep focusing on, even if it means 2-foot banana rats?
PFEIFFER: You know, one of the reasons I care about Guantanamo a lot and really like reporting about Guantanamo is that I believe that no matter your politics, you should care because there are also a lot of financial issues to be concerned about. I originally started covering Guantanamo because I wanted to look into the cost. It's - at that point in 2019, it was $6 billion spent so far of taxpayer money.
DETROW: Billion.
PFEIFFER: Billion - that was back then. I'm trying to let people know objectively what's happening down there on a legal front, on a human rights front and on a financial government spending front so that people can make their own decisions about whether they think that's a good use of our country's resources and our taxpayer money. And so I like being able to try to bring that information to the public, even if most people don't seem to be paying attention.
DETROW: That is NPR investigative correspondent Sacha Pfeiffer helping us understand how she reports on Guantanamo Bay. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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