Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and gives a behind-the-scenes look at how our journalism is made.
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba – Like so many articles, our Sunday paper project on the once-secret Pentagon photos of the early days of US detention operations here, in 2002, began with a tip.
Somewhere in the Pentagon was a treasure trove of photos taken by photographers from the elite Combat Camera unit, one who had worked in the prison said last year. The military photographers spent months documenting the goings-on in Guantanamo Bay in the first year after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The photos were taken for senior Pentagon leaders — especially Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense who had a personal, day-to-day interest in the detention center. And they certainly weren’t meant for the public to see.
I thought back to the day the first prisoners from Afghanistan arrived at this remote base, on January 11, 2002. I was among a group of journalists who were allowed to watch from a platform above the runway as the prisoners of a steel gray cargo plane — cuffed, masked and in matching orange uniforms. Nearby, my colleague from The Miami Herald, photographer Tim Chapman, walked around our vantage point in frustration—he shouldn’t have brought his cameras to capture the moment. To his dismay, he saw military photographers on the runway, where he wanted to be.
The world would glimpse the work of one of those photographers, Navy Petty Officer Shane T. McCoy, about a week later, when the military released five of his photos, including one symbolizing Guantánamo Bay: 20 men on their knees. in a chain-linked enclosure on opening day.
And nearly 20 years later, I learned that many more photos from that time had been sent to the Pentagon from Guantánamo. One winter’s day in Washington, the hunt for those images began.
One Department of Defense office sent me to another.
Some people pointed me to the Library of Congress. Others were sure that some of the photos had ended up in the National Archives, and that turned out to be true.
I made a series of Freedom of Information Act requests, followed up on phone calls and emails, and over time heard several collections of Guantánamo material, much of it classified.
A day earlier this year, an archivist announced that material had already been released. A zip file arrived in my email and pictures of men in orange uniforms splashed onto my computer screen.
Some of what I saw in those first year images published in The Times I understood because I had reported on base at the time. But other things baffled me and required digging.
I explained to Marisa Schwartz Taylor, a photography editor for The Times in Washington. We looked at the photos together and agreed that this was something special – the kind of FOIA refund that doesn’t end a reporting job, but rather starts one. She made a first edit, asked a lot of questions and got me started. She enlisted Rebecca Lieberman, a digital news designer for The Times, and the teamwork began.
The three of us in different locations — Rebecca in New York, Marisa in Washington, and me usually in Miami Beach or in Guantánamo — we studied the images and decided we needed more information to put them into context. Rebecca created a design that would annotate the photos and provide readers with a guide to what they were seeing.
I contacted retired military personnel who had worked in the prison from the beginning. Many people I wrote or called were intrigued. A few snubbed me; they wouldn’t talk about the early days of a military mission that had soured for some over the years.
Dallas-based photographer Jeremy Lock, now retired from the Air Force after a celebrated career with Combat Camera, was thrilled when I reached out to him. He wondered when the world would ever see his work from that day on.
Carol Rosenberg has been reporting from the US Naval Base and Military Prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since 2002. She joined DailyExpertNews in 2019.