The naval base at Guantánamo Bay was chosen in January 2002 precisely because the administration believed no court's writ ran there. Some 780 Muslim men and boys passed through its cages and cellblocks — the vast majority never charged with anything, many sold to U.S. forces for bounties — subjected to an interrogation regime of stress positions, isolation, and "enhanced" techniques that the Senate later documented as torture. The Supreme Court forced open the courthouse door in Rasul (2004) and Boumediene (2008), affirming the detainees' right to habeas corpus, but review proved no guarantee of release.
Two decades on, the prison still holds men cleared for transfer by every relevant agency yet detained year after year — indefinite detention without trial as settled American practice, at a cost of more than $500 million a year at its peak. The military commissions have produced a handful of convictions, several later overturned, while the 9/11 case itself remains mired in pretrial litigation over torture. For the political-prisoner tradition, Guantánamo is the war on terror's purest artifact: imprisonment defined not by verdict but by category.