I Expected 2021 to Be a Hectic Year at Guantánamo. I Was Wrong.

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On the press room at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in a decaying hangar, reporters converse ruefully about what has come to be known as the Curse of the Curtain-Raiser. Within the jargon of journalism, a “curtain raiser” is an article that tells readers what’s coming in an interesting, informative method — possibly an election, a playoff recreation or a congressional listening to of consequence.

However at Guantánamo it’s a perilous pursuit. Solely essentially the most naïve or optimistic journalist dares to predict what may occur at the place President Barack Obama mentioned he would shut, and couldn’t.

In the summertime of 2012, for instance, the Pentagon introduced 20 journalists there for a pretrial listening to within the case towards Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and 4 different males accused of conspiring within the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults. One reporter wrote that the subject can be torture. One other mentioned a problem to courtroom secrecy was on the agenda. A New Jersey paper wrote that a native couple was touring there to “stare into the eyes of 5 males accused of murdering their son and hundreds of different 9/11 victims.”

None of that occurred. First, a practice derailed in Maryland, severing safe communications to the courtroom in Cuba, forcing a delay. Then, a storm prompted the Pentagon to evacuate nearly everybody concerned within the listening to — 177 folks on a single flight to the mainland — leaving the prisoners and troopers to journey out Hurricane Isaac. However the storm veered north, sparing the bottom.

That’s the factor about reporting on Guantánamo: Write about it, and it’ll not occur.

In 2016 and 2017, reporters from a half a dozen information retailers wrote that the primary man to be waterboarded within the C.I.A. torture program would testify concerning the situations at Guantánamo’s most clandestine jail, Camp 7. It’s three years later, and the prisoner often called Abu Zubaydah has but to take the stand.

Generally authorized technique or sickness derails the schedule. Different instances logistics or the climate are to blame. It’s by no means simple to maintain a listening to at the Expeditionary Authorized Complicated, whose courtroom is inside a constructing encased in corrugated steel on a cracked, out of date airstrip, with a close by tent metropolis and trailer park. Final yr, a listening to lasted two days as a result of a Marine Corps choose had to be medically evacuated to Florida for emergency eye surgical procedure. It was an excessive amount of for the Navy’s 12-bed base hospital to deal with.

So I ought to have recognized higher in December when I consulted the calendar, counted up 215 scheduled courtroom days and wrote about how 2021 was shaping up to be my almost nonstop yr as a Guantánamo war-court reporter. (Most years I focus as a lot on the jail and the folks as I do on the courtroom.)

There was not a whiff of the approaching coronavirus disaster. Nor was there a trace that the 49-year-old profession Air Power officer choose who had set an formidable timetable of hearings towards an early 2021 trial for the Sept. 11 case, would instantly retire in “one of the best pursuits of my household.” But to occur was a long-serving, 75-year-old capital defender for one of many 9/11 defendants, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, leaving the case on his heart specialist’s recommendation, a separate supply of delay.

No listening to has been held since late February. No reporter has set foot on the 45-square-mile base of 6,000 residents behind a Cuban minefield, amongst them 250 faculty youngsters whose Navy and contractor mother and father have principally opted to ship them to examine at the bottom faculty reasonably than to study remotely. Not one of the 40 wartime prisoners there have had an in-person authorized assembly because the World Well being Group declared the coronavirus a pandemic on March 11.

Guantánamo immediately is in a little bit of a mix-and-match existence. The gymnasium, outside cinemas and church buildings are open, with social-distancing insurance policies in place. New troopers from principally Military Nationwide Guard models nonetheless arrive on nine-month excursions of obligation and are put in isolation for 2 weeks. However after confirming two Covid-19 instances in March and April, the navy is now forbidden from discussing new instances.

Flights are rare, aside from the twice weekly fridge airplane that brings contemporary fruit and veggies. Guests are uncommon. Judges within the two capital instances — towards the lads accused of plotting 9/11 and one other man accused of conspiring in the usS. Cole bombing, in 2000 — have canceled six scheduled hearings to date. One declared the jail’s plan for a 14-day quarantine for newcomers “unduly burdensome.”

Life on the bottom has in some respects reverted to its time as a principally forgotten backwater earlier than the Marines walked 20 prisoners off a now defunct C-141 Starlifter cargo airplane and opened Camp X-Ray on Jan. 11, 2002.

Even the Worldwide Pink Cross, which usually visits Guantánamo 4 instances a yr, has canceled its end-of-summer go to — its second cancellation of the pandemic. I talked about the group’s deliberate journey in an article in Could, possibly tempting the curse.

About that curse: When I first proposed writing about how foolhardy I was to counsel a busy yr at the courtroom, which Congress particularly designed with out a speedy trial provision, an editor teased: “You don’t suppose you introduced on the coronavirus pandemic, do you?” In fact not. However when it comes to predicting what would occur at Guantánamo, I ought to have recognized higher.