Serial S04 - Ep. 7: The Forever Reporter

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Speaker 5 Previously on serial.

Speaker 4 Our mission today is to provide safe, humane, legal, and transparent custody of the detainees here.

Speaker 6 Safe, legal, transparent care.

Speaker 10 But you'll have another. This is something that they would never have made public, but

Speaker 10 the day of the riot, morale was never higher. How are we we going to basically explain we let this happen?

Speaker 3 From Serial Productions and the New York Times, this is Serial Season 4, Guantanamo, One Prison Camp Told Week by Week.

Speaker 14 I'm Sarah Koenig.

Speaker 17 We're going to jump forward to present-day Guantanamo, now-ish, for the rest of this series.

Speaker 19 I'm going to start in summer of 2022, when Dana and I went down to Guantanamo a second time.

Speaker 7 Media can't tour the prison compound anymore, but you can go down to report on the special court at Guantanamo, called the Military Commissions.

Speaker 28 Five cases are still in some phase of criminal prosecution, including the case against the men accused of planning the 9-11 attacks.

Speaker 31 So we went to the court, which we'd never seen in action before.

Speaker 34 Two other reporters are there with us, John Ryan from a legal affairs publication called Law Dragon and Carol Rosenberg, formerly of the Miami Herald, now of the New York Times.

Speaker 36 Carol's been covering Guantanamo for more than 20 years.

Speaker 37 She's the one to watch here.

Speaker 28 You can't bring any recording equipment into the courtroom, so I don't have tape for this part.

Speaker 39 I'll just tell it.

Speaker 22 Army soldiers are checking us through security at the entrance to the court.

Speaker 40 They tell us, no, you cannot bring your coffee into the spectator's gallery.

Speaker 11 This doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Speaker 26 Lots of courtrooms don't allow beverages.

Speaker 18 But Carol pushes back.

Speaker 42 Is that a new rule, Carol asks.

Speaker 34 Why?

Speaker 43 Can someone go ask why?

Speaker 22 Once we're inside, before we even take our seats, drama begins. Not inside the actual courtroom, mind you, where the lawyers and defendants and judges will soon be, but in our section, the gallery.

Speaker 47 I'm standing with Carol at the thick glass windows that separate us from the courtroom.

Speaker 29 She's explaining to me what's what.

Speaker 18 When an army MP in charge of security, a guard, tells us to sit down.

Speaker 25 Which does seem unreasonable.

Speaker 49 Court hasn't even started.

Speaker 36 There's no one here but us.

Speaker 49 The guard is stern and excessively bossy.

Speaker 51 We've always been able to stand at the glass before court begins, Carol says.

Speaker 52 Is that a new rule?

Speaker 43 No answer.

Speaker 23 Carol sits in her assigned seat.

Speaker 31 They've got all us reporters in the front row, but separated by one.

Speaker 28 John Ryan's in seat number three, then me in number five, Dana's in seven.

Speaker 29 Carol's seat is number one.

Speaker 28 We are told by the guard our notebooks will be confiscated if we doodle or make drawings that depict the courtroom.

Speaker 25 I assume this is an empty threat, but Carol clocks it, points above her head.

Speaker 47 Her seat, the number one seat, is right under a camera that can see what she writes.

Speaker 45 First things first.

Speaker 27 Can you run down the coffee question, Carol asks.

Speaker 41 We did, ma'am. They told us only water bottles.

Speaker 26 The planets are in retrograde, Carol grumbles.

Speaker 57 This is a new rotation of MPs.

Speaker 28 They don't know what they're doing yet.

Speaker 22 Carol figures maybe this uptight guard will relax when she sees we know how to behave.

Speaker 29 But the guard doesn't let up, and when we return the next day, the guard is back and then some.

Speaker 23 I get caught whispering something to Carol.

Speaker 26 We are not going to have conversations, the guard snaps.

Speaker 58 Then, as a witness is testifying, she hollers, wake up, into her radio, admonishing a fellow guard dozing inside the courtroom.

Speaker 28 Sleeping is against the rules.

Speaker 47 A little later, May Day, I see John Ryan to my left, nodding off.

Speaker 28 I don't know what to do.

Speaker 22 There's a wide empty seat between us. The seats are oversized and comfortable, just right for a nap, so there's no way to subtly nudge him.

Speaker 26 Plus, I don't know John really.

Speaker 29 It's not my place to get between him and some shut-eye.

Speaker 22 As I mull the most collegial course of action, she appears, the terrifying guard, gets right up in John's startled face.

Speaker 3 She tells him to stop sleeping, and if you can't stay awake, I'm going to ask you to leave.

Speaker 15 John's been covering this court for seven years and this has never happened to him before.

Speaker 45 He keeps saying, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine.

Speaker 15 All this is aggravating, of course, insulting.

Speaker 26 We're being treated like children.

Speaker 22 But frankly, it rolls off Dana and me.

Speaker 28 An amusement more than anything.

Speaker 18 After this week, we're out of here.

Speaker 49 But Carol?

Speaker 47 Carol is livid.

Speaker 29 Behold the sound of indignation as absorbed by Carol Rosenberg's keyboard.

Speaker 61 Back at the Media Operations Center, the Mock, that's where reporters work from down here, Carol is writing up a memo about the Mean Guard, an Army specialist.

Speaker 64 It's too long.

Speaker 65 What do you got?

Speaker 9 I'm going to talk like such a bitch.

Speaker 64 Can we please get the Army specialist

Speaker 22 not to do disruptive outbursts while court is in session?

Speaker 64 The guard surely did not benefit from left-seat, right-seat training.

Speaker 28 I assumed she was firing off an email to this guy, Ron, the public affairs director for the military commissions.

Speaker 22 But she could just call Ron if she wanted to vent.

Speaker 28 So maybe she wasn't writing to Ron?

Speaker 24 Who are you writing to?

Speaker 64 I haven't decided yet.

Speaker 39 I'm thinking the director general,

Speaker 67 obviously Ron,

Speaker 64 probably the chief prosecutor, and

Speaker 68 I'm not sure the chief defense attorney.

Speaker 64 And I'm trying to decide, like, since this is supposed to be a public hearing and there seems to be a systematic harassment of the public trying to just observe.

Speaker 25 Probably someone at the Pentagon.

Speaker 68 But the question is whether to also add the couple of the congressmen who are really interested in making keeping these things public.

Speaker 33 What had I missed here?

Speaker 24 I mean, the guard was rude and all, but the Pentagon?

Speaker 36 Maybe some congressman?

Speaker 56 I asked her kind of sideways.

Speaker 26 I'm a little scared of Carol myself.

Speaker 24 Is that necessary?

Speaker 23 Because the guard's temporary.

Speaker 12 She's going to be gone in some short amount of time and replace

Speaker 64 nine months. I know this just sounds really petty, but

Speaker 64 like John said, it could be a really long fucking year if she's harassing people nonstop in there every time we go to court.

Speaker 11 This is an important case, a capital case.

Speaker 71 And it's not like I can just grab a transcript, Carol points out.

Speaker 57 I've got one shot in there to hear what's going on.

Speaker 64 The two of us take this seriously. We take notes, we pay attention, we consult,

Speaker 64 and she's made it hard. I mean, some of that was like during, it was really disruptive during kind of key testimony.

Speaker 29 Right. But so like, that's the fight in front of us, but what's the larger fight you're fighting?

Speaker 26 Just to zoom out for a second.

Speaker 64 I don't know if it's a fight.

Speaker 28 I know that when I say Carol's been covering Guantanamo for more than 20 years, that's a sentence that can slide by quickly.

Speaker 73 So let me be clear.

Speaker 21 I don't mean Carol checks in on Guantanamo from time to time.

Speaker 74 I mean Carol Rosenberg is the Guantanamo reporter.

Speaker 29 Carol was here the day the prison opened, and she's been here ever since, for more than two decades.

Speaker 28 While other reporters came and went, Carol stayed.

Speaker 3 She has never stepped away, never even paused.

Speaker 20 Carol knows more about Guantanamo than anyone in the world.

Speaker 25 She alone holds its institutional memory.

Speaker 29 I'm overstating, but only slightly when I say that whatever the rest of us back on the mainland know about Guantanamo, Guantanamo, it's because of Carol.

Speaker 3 And she covers this beat more or less by herself.

Speaker 17 John only covers the court and he doesn't always come.

Speaker 29 So that means it's all on Carol.

Speaker 22 She is writing not just the first draft of Guantanamo history, but in some instances, the only draft.

Speaker 51 And what she's been struggling against in a hundred different ways for years now is that the military has been making it harder and harder for her or anyone to report from down here.

Speaker 53 Today's nonsense is just the latest encroachment.

Speaker 7 You can see how it might work her nerves.

Speaker 55 An army specialist, a pitcher on a power trip, is going to make her job harder than it already is?

Speaker 69 Uh-uh.

Speaker 18 So I don't know if it's a fight.

Speaker 64 Well, yeah, it's a fight against being disrespected. Consistently disrespected.

Speaker 72 Dana asks Carol, can't you just take this guard aside and say, hey, listen, this isn't how this works here.

Speaker 13 No, she can't do that, she says, because that'd be against the rules.

Speaker 22 They just, they don't understand how abnormal all this is, she says.

Speaker 50 This culture of threats and supervision of the press, that you can't talk to a guard, that you can't come and go from the courtroom as you please.

Speaker 64 Can't.

Speaker 58 You can't get up and go to the bathroom.

Speaker 64 There was a period when

Speaker 64 if one reporter needed to go to the bathroom, everybody had to get up and go up.

Speaker 76 And if you don't have to go to the bathroom, they force you to try. It's so humiliating.

Speaker 26 That's John.

Speaker 64 The problem with John is like, I get so heated and then he's so funny, I want to laugh, but I get angry.

Speaker 58 Angrier.

Speaker 39 All right, I'll let you get to it.

Speaker 12 At 3.14 p.m., Carol sends her memo.

Speaker 29 Four minutes later, someone emails her back saying they'll look into it pronto.

Speaker 77 And a half hour after that, the mean guard is gone.

Speaker 23 We're told she's going to be retrained and reassigned.

Speaker 14 The next time we go to court, big smiles from everyone.

Speaker 13 There's a bowl of candy on the desk where they check our badges, and not the cheap kind, the good kind. MMs, mini Kit Kats, mini Twix.

Speaker 11 The uniformed young woman who wants me down for weapons admires my pin.

Speaker 47 Inside the gallery, the guard reads the rules in a voice quavery with nerves and then gently announces that he might stand up during court now and then because he has a bad back.

Speaker 23 I hope it doesn't make you uncomfortable, he says. I apologize in advance if it makes you uncomfortable.

Speaker 24 Carol Rosenberg won Guantanamo Guard Force Zero.

Speaker 69 A swift, clean wind.

Speaker 55 To the first timer, i.e.

Speaker 47 me, Carol's fights might seem a little nuts.

Speaker 12 And I'm not dismissing the notion that Guantanamo has driven Carol a little nuts.

Speaker 26 What's incredible is that this place hasn't driven her completely nuts.

Speaker 74 It wasn't always this way.

Speaker 75 Carol hasn't endured two solid decades of disrespect.

Speaker 14 She couldn't have taken it, she told me.

Speaker 46 But right now is a bad period.

Speaker 26 Perhaps counterintuitively, late-stage Guantanamo, with its shrunken prison population and sputtering court, is even less open to public view and more aggressively anti-Carol than early stage Guantanamo, which seemed backwards to me.

Speaker 35 The government was hiding so much more back in the day.

Speaker 11 Who the prisoners were, for instance, all the ways we abused them.

Speaker 56 What's left to hide?

Speaker 18 That's what this episode is about, the battle that's now underway at Guantanamo.

Speaker 37 Carol broke it down for me.

Speaker 73 The deterioration of her access here, what she calls the closing of the the aperture, it isn't about protecting Guantanamo's secrets.

Speaker 26 It's about something else entirely.

Speaker 41 I don't want to oversimplify.

Speaker 29 The military was never thrilled to have Carol at Guantanamo, but to give you a sense of what better times were like for her.

Speaker 29 In 2003, for example, General Jeffrey Miller, who oversaw some of the most brutal treatment of detainees at Guantanamo, General Miller invited Carol down to the camp to serve serve the troops' Thanksgiving dinner.

Speaker 26 In the military, the officers serve the enlisted on Thanksgiving, so it was Carol and a bunch of generals wearing aprons in the galley.

Speaker 57 Afterwards, she and the officers of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, the JTF, sat down for their meal, the most lavish Thanksgiving spread she had ever seen the military put on.

Speaker 64 There was like

Speaker 14 towers of shrimp and

Speaker 64 maybe lobster tails and giant hams and obviously turkey and smoked salmon. I just remember it being so opulent, it reminded me of a buffet in the Persian Gulf.
And

Speaker 64 it was sort of a reflection, I thought, of the fact that the JTF was riding high and could do anything it wanted and order anything it wanted. And there was nothing they couldn't get.

Speaker 66 They had lobster tails and piles of shrimp and a story to tell, a story they wanted Americans to hear, which was this.

Speaker 39 We got them.

Speaker 71 We got the terrorists who attacked us on 9-11.

Speaker 24 Not all of them, but hundreds of them.

Speaker 51 And we're going to treat them humanely and still get justice for the American people.

Speaker 22 Carol says she was wise to what this was, an effort to co-opt her.

Speaker 7 But the upside was that by having her serve mashed potatoes,

Speaker 64 it signaled to

Speaker 80 the

Speaker 64 troops that I was somehow considered someone

Speaker 64 important,

Speaker 64 which

Speaker 64 I think

Speaker 64 contributed to people being willing to talk to me.

Speaker 29 She wasn't necessarily writing the stories the military wanted her to write.

Speaker 26 Guantanamo detainees, mostly young foot soldiers, was an early 2002 headline. Or she'd ask unwelcome questions about the Geneva Convention, say.

Speaker 73 But even so, Carol was allowed to talk to all kinds of personnel.

Speaker 7 Guards, commanders, their deputies, medical staff.

Speaker 23 Back in the day, Carol could ask factual questions and feel pretty confident she'd get an answer.

Speaker 66 Maybe not always a factually true answer, but an answer.

Speaker 50 She was allowed to watch a Pashto literacy class and write about it.

Speaker 18 She could see where the Uyghurs, a persecuted Muslim group from China, were being housed while the U.S.

Speaker 15 government tried to figure out how to get rid of them.

Speaker 70 The Uyghurs have a little garden, she wrote.

Speaker 40 They planted orange seeds and have inch-high seedlings they are cultivating.

Speaker 22 She could ask if someone would please bring her tape recorder inside the prison.

Speaker 43 So she could get sound of the call to prayer during during Ramadan, and they'd do it.

Speaker 31 Another advantage of the early years, colleagues, other correspondents, all the big papers and magazines, TV people, foreign reporters, which meant more people asking questions, asking for access, more people pushing back against the DOD's restrictions.

Speaker 28 From the get-go, Carol's coverage was singular, singular, more comprehensive than anyone else's and often more annoying to the government.

Speaker 47 She tried relentlessly to figure out how much Guantanamo was costing us.

Speaker 70 A $13.4 million super secure building for investigators, a $744,000 soccer field, a $32,000 shipping refrigerator designed to hold dead bodies but used to store bottled water.

Speaker 24 All Carol's reporting.

Speaker 29 Most expensive prison on earth was a 2011 headline.

Speaker 26 Outlandish gossip has swirled around this base about how Carol finds stuff out.

Speaker 52 A former public affairs officer told me that in orientation sessions for incoming troops, they were warned that Carol might try to trick them.

Speaker 47 The nuttiest thing he heard before he put a stop to it, Carol hired attractive young men and women to flirt with personnel in bars so they'd reveal sensitive information.

Speaker 22 All these people misunderstand.

Speaker 71 Carol is old school.

Speaker 37 She's not a lurker or an eavesdropper.

Speaker 22 She reads and she files records requests and she works the phones.

Speaker 64 It was.

Speaker 64 No,

Speaker 64 I'm...

Speaker 80 Okay.

Speaker 3 If she wants information from a source, she makes it bracingly clear.

Speaker 14 She's talking to an attorney she's known a while.

Speaker 64 I don't want you to disclose it.

Speaker 29 What I'm trying to find out is...

Speaker 21 And she's not being an asshole.

Speaker 27 She's being explicit.

Speaker 25 I am not trying to endanger your security clearance.

Speaker 13 I'm not going to trap you and screw you up.

Speaker 9 But I'll talk to you later.

Speaker 65 Okay, bye-bye.

Speaker 42 Ubiquity, not stealth, has always been Carol's reporting strategy at Guantanamo.

Speaker 11 Technically, she's based based in Miami.

Speaker 26 She owns a condo there, but she half lives at Guantanamo, like a naturalized citizen of this hermetic world.

Speaker 39 There's Carol's desk, Carol's clock, Carol's whiteboard, Carol's leftovers in the fridge.

Speaker 68 Some of this stuff is like expired by years and years.

Speaker 24 Carol's broken down bike.

Speaker 64 There's a problem when I try to drive it.

Speaker 34 Here, listen, it's that this...

Speaker 41 From the very beginning, Carol tried to be here as often as possible.

Speaker 77 She took the prison tour at least once a month, tried to to attend every administrative hearing and court proceeding for every defendant.

Speaker 53 That's how she finds stuff out, which, on occasion, has led to retribution.

Speaker 29 In late 2006, Carol broke a story about a building project that infuriated the Pentagon.

Speaker 3 Afterwards, Carol says she got a call from a certain general who informed her she could look forward to sleeping in a tent from here on out.

Speaker 34 And it happened.

Speaker 26 Reporters who'd been sleeping in a hotel were now bunking in big, Kwanzat hut-shaped tents erected on an abandoned airstrip out by the court.

Speaker 38 Carol said the tents weren't so bad, actually, except that you never felt clean and you were nowhere near any amenities and your glasses would fog up every time you had to leave the over-air-conditioned tent to use the bathroom outside.

Speaker 61 No matter, Carol kept coming.

Speaker 18 But over the years, the colleagues fell away.

Speaker 26 A big gang would still show up for big events, 9-11 anniversaries say, but more often, a trickle.

Speaker 29 At times, she'd be the only person staying in the hulking military tents out there on the old airstrip, trying to communicate the improvisational nature of this mission and how it was becoming permanent.

Speaker 18 For Carol, those were the good years.

Speaker 70 So that's how it went for the first decade or so.

Speaker 18 But Carol says the relationship between Guantanamo and the press took a decisive sour turn about halfway through Obama's presidency.

Speaker 64 The real beginning of the end,

Speaker 8 actually,

Speaker 64 looking back, is the hunger strike and John Kelly's reaction to it.

Speaker 29 John Kelly is Marine Corps General John Kelly.

Speaker 25 He was in charge of U.S.

Speaker 12 Southern Command, Southcom, the DOD command center responsible for Guantanamo, during the most widely publicized and effective hunger strike ever organized there.

Speaker 18 Obama, remember, had announced when he took office that he was going to close Guantanamo within the year.

Speaker 53 That was in January of 2009.

Speaker 43 Carol's coverage, along with everyone else's, began asking, how's Obama going to pull this off?

Speaker 12 What's the plan?

Speaker 22 No one was more interested in the answers to those questions than the detainees themselves.

Speaker 26 By the time Obama's second term rolled around, they were pissed. There'd been yet another flare-up over claims that personnel were mishandling the Quran.

Speaker 42 Navy guards had been replaced by Army MPs who were rougher and more restrictive.

Speaker 14 But the detainees' underlying complaint was that of the 166 men still there, more than half had been cleared to leave Guantanamo by the Obama administration.

Speaker 50 Yet there they still sat.

Speaker 37 Spring of 2013, Carol confirmed the lawyers' reports that the detainees were hunger striking.

Speaker 57 She figured it out by watching their untouched food rations get thrown into a dumpster after lunch.

Speaker 41 Carol was all over the news.

Speaker 82 So everybody's in lockdown while they figure out how they're going to manage this hunger strike.

Speaker 83 I had one Marine major who's a defense lawyer this week tell me his client hasn't even gotten his toothbrush since lockdown.

Speaker 64 Well, you know, the head of the International Red Cross tells us that they oppose force feeding.

Speaker 82 And that some people people describe it as torture.

Speaker 83 So, whatever is going on down there,

Speaker 83 it's a very dark period for Guantanamo.

Speaker 3 Carol's paper, the Miami Herald, began publishing a daily hunger strike tracker showing how many people were refusing food, how many were being tube-fed, how many were hospitalized.

Speaker 26 Over at Southcom, General John Kelly was unhappy.

Speaker 64 He got very angry at the coverage.

Speaker 64 He believed that the media were too sympathetic to the prisoners, that

Speaker 64 the prisoners were manipulating, and their lawyers were manipulating the media.

Speaker 63 General Kelly fought back.

Speaker 18 He told the JTF to stop providing the hunger strike data.

Speaker 32 He declared that information suddenly off-limits, which shut down the Herald's tracker.

Speaker 29 He'd institute a rule that of the couple thousand people working at the JTF, only six of them could be quoted by name or photographed.

Speaker 75 Six approved faces, they called them, consisting of commanders or public affairs people, i.e., no more talking to guards.

Speaker 29 At one point, he tried unsuccessfully to shrink media visits to one day, once per quarter.

Speaker 26 That's how much he wanted them out.

Speaker 26 General Kelly went on to become President Trump's Homeland Security Secretary and then his chief of staff.

Speaker 26 He declined to speak to me, but during a speech he made just before he left Southcom, his feelings tumbled out.

Speaker 76 You're the best 1% of our society. I'm convinced of that.

Speaker 80 You're all

Speaker 76 good and decent men and women.

Speaker 57 He was addressing the troops at Guantanamo, who'd gathered in the chapel on the base.

Speaker 44 He praised them lavishly, told them they were the salt of the earth.

Speaker 25 Ordinary Americans, he said, who do an extraordinary job under enormous stress.

Speaker 76 And it always breaks my heart when I read the negative reporting of what theoretically or what supposedly goes on here.

Speaker 76 Breaks my heart because I know the reporting is wrong and I believe the media representatives that report what goes on here know it's wrong, but they go on their merry way highlighting the speech lasted only 15 minutes, but he laced it with frequent references to the agenda-driven press, the critics who don't know the meaning of honor or integrity or duty.

Speaker 76 They will never stop hurling their dishonest accusations at us.

Speaker 76 They'll never tell the truth because it's not in their interest to tell the truth.

Speaker 46 Fake news was not yet in the political vernacular, but you can hear.

Speaker 24 It's coming.

Speaker 72 That's after the break.

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Speaker 10 Spicy,

Speaker 2 but not too spicy.

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I'm 35 years old. I still share my parents' New York Times subscription.

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I do the crossword. I do the spelling bee.

Speaker 86 I do the word all.

Speaker 24 Please help.

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My friends could save their recipes.

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Speaker 84 We both love cooking. I'm a 30-minute and under-dinner girly.
My boyfriend is very elaborate. I think him having his own profile would be great.

Speaker 72 We love the New York Times and we would love to love it individually.

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One subscription, up to four separate logins for anyone in your life. Find out more at nytimes.com slash family.

Speaker 74 For the government, in the beginning at least, Guantanamo was a good news story.

Speaker 39 We got them.

Speaker 52 We're bringing them to justice.

Speaker 22 Then it became the shameful place the president tried to close but couldn't.

Speaker 56 And by Trump's inauguration, apart from serving as an occasional punchline for Donald Trump himself, Guantanamo was an albatross endlessly circling the Pentagon's neck.

Speaker 26 To use terms Carol herself coined, a forever prison housing a bunch of forever prisoners.

Speaker 64 For me, I had to recalibrate, right? I knew it wasn't going to close, but now how am I going to cover it under Trump? And so the story became Guantanamo forever.

Speaker 28 It was poison, this story, to Democrats and Republicans alike.

Speaker 11 Everyone's failure, everyone's burden.

Speaker 29 Better to cork it and bury it, pray that its noxious political half-life doesn't outlast your own.

Speaker 14 It seemed to Carol that no one in government wanted to be reminded of Guantanamo or wanted the American people reminded of Guantanamo.

Speaker 43 An attitude compounded by something else, dark and new.

Speaker 64 A culture during the Trump administration that allowed you to

Speaker 64 more than disrespect the media. I mean, that set in down here during COVID in a way that was like viral.
Truly hating the media,

Speaker 64 not wanting them here,

Speaker 29 hating reporters, lest you think she's exaggerating.

Speaker 90 Carol was hated.

Speaker 5 Hated. I mean,

Speaker 5 Carol was the bane of the existence of the senior officer Gitmo when I was there, period.

Speaker 79 That is recently retired Navy commander Daniel Bernardi, who was the public affairs officer for the JTF at Guantanamo in 2020.

Speaker 22 His job, in no small part, was to talk to reporters.

Speaker 5 In fact, it was explicit that people, if they see Carol, are not to be speaking to her.

Speaker 70 Daniel Bernardi was the first person to offer me a clear view into the world Carol was and still is up against.

Speaker 14 He's the one who explained how the Guantanamo leadership fashioned Carol into a threat.

Speaker 29 I've been trying to talk to Daniel on the record for almost two years before he was finally able to do it, once he officially retired from the Navy and could speak freely.

Speaker 5 I could tell you that Carol was called bitch more than a few times in my presence.

Speaker 48 Privately, in private conversations or in like open meetings?

Speaker 34 Open.

Speaker 69 Not everybody.

Speaker 69 And these are officers?

Speaker 34 Yeah.

Speaker 22 Am I dumb to be shocked by that?

Speaker 24 I find that shocking.

Speaker 5 A little bit dumb, honestly. I mean, I don't know.

Speaker 69 No, I mean,

Speaker 69 okay, all right.

Speaker 26 He told me his first whiff that something was off about the command's perception of Carol came before he even landed at Guantanamo.

Speaker 63 He was in Miami at Southcom, waiting for permission to fly to the base, getting briefed on his new job.

Speaker 74 And he was handed a big binder, copies of Carol's stories and printouts of her tweets.

Speaker 25 There was no heading that said, watch out for this person, but he said that was the implication, that she was somehow unethical, a problem.

Speaker 57 Daniel, he was coming in fresh, let's say.

Speaker 5 I didn't know who the heck she was. I was, now, mind you, I didn't act like I didn't know she was.

Speaker 69 I was like, oh, Carol. Oh, of course.

Speaker 5 You know, you know, but I had no clue.

Speaker 57 When he finally arrives at Guantanamo, strange things happen.

Speaker 29 His boss, the Navy admiral in charge of the JTF, won't set a meeting with him.

Speaker 40 And the person he's replacing, Maria, a then Navy commander and a friend of his, she seems totally spooked.

Speaker 3 He says one day she's showing him around.

Speaker 29 They go over to meet the public affairs officer for the naval base just for an introduction.

Speaker 5 And we go into this person's office and Maria puts her two cell phones in a microwave.

Speaker 90 And,

Speaker 69 yeah, I'm like, what the hell?

Speaker 5 You know.

Speaker 20 And just so we're clear, that's the move like you do in the movies when you don't want somebody eavesdropping on what you're doing.

Speaker 5 Yeah, well, I didn't know that.

Speaker 34 Oh, okay. Right.

Speaker 5 Like, so I know I watch a lot of movies, but I was like, what the heck is going on here?

Speaker 5 And then she just tells me, you know, I think they listen to us.

Speaker 5 Oh, my God. And so we want to have a private conversation here, and I don't know.

Speaker 5 And I'm like,

Speaker 5 what the heck could we possibly say that would be something we wouldn't want them to hear? And why would they want to hear what we have to say?

Speaker 28 Not to mention, who is the they?

Speaker 16 The intelligence services?

Speaker 24 Daniel didn't know.

Speaker 52 Maria didn't want to participate in this story, so I couldn't ask her.

Speaker 19 This was spring of 2020.

Speaker 22 Because of COVID, reporters weren't allowed on the base at all.

Speaker 77 They'd suspended all media tours of the JTF.

Speaker 24 The court was on hold.

Speaker 38 Carol couldn't get down there.

Speaker 45 It would end up being her longest stretch away, a total of 500 days.

Speaker 42 So she and Daniel never met in person, but they did speak on the phone.

Speaker 28 She'd ask him questions, basic information, and he mostly was told he couldn't answer her.

Speaker 14 Once or twice he says he was given false information to pass on to her, which made made him mad.

Speaker 37 He'd been instructed to prepare his commander, the admiral in charge of the JTF, for a roundtable discussion with reporters and to start planning for a resumption of media tours.

Speaker 16 But after a while, he realized, oh, I see.

Speaker 48 They don't intend to do any media whatsoever.

Speaker 57 It was dawning on him.

Speaker 71 The whole public affairs apparatus at Guantanamo seemed frozen.

Speaker 46 Commanders and press officers whose job is to speak to the press acting like they'd be investigated or fired for speaking to the press, for speaking to Carol.

Speaker 59 Daniel Bernardi said the fear seemed to have taken root about a year earlier, when the previous JTF commander, Admiral John Ring, whom I'm told was well-liked by a lot of people at Guantanamo, had been fired.

Speaker 91 Fired?

Speaker 21 It's not often an admiral gets fired.

Speaker 71 The announcement came the very same day Carol published a long article in The Times, quoting Admiral Ring.

Speaker 22 He'd sat down with reporters during a four-day media visit and talked about how the prison might need to update its facilities to accommodate the ailments of the aging prisoners.

Speaker 52 In her story, Carol detailed, not without tenderness, some of their conditions, people using canes and walkers and braces.

Speaker 43 Admiral Ring didn't want to speak to me for this story, but Daniel says by the time he got to Guantanamo, his sense was that while many senior people at Southcom and at Guantanamo understood that Carol wasn't the cause of Admiral Ring's firing, many other people didn't.

Speaker 22 The timing rhymed too nicely with their distrust of the media.

Speaker 17 And so coincidence slid into causality.

Speaker 33 Ring was fired because he spoke to Carol.

Speaker 24 Again, not true, but to some people, it felt true.

Speaker 15 The real story was that Ring had been under investigation for other complaints, including his management style and a couple of security spills.

Speaker 26 I'll spare you the complicated backstory, but the upshot, according to Ring's then-public affairs officer, was that everyone seemed to turn on the public affairs staff.

Speaker 25 treated them like pariahs, he said.

Speaker 23 So they became miserable in their jobs, and in turn, treated Carol like kryptonite.

Speaker 23 And then there was Zach.

Speaker 29 And please bear with me while I take you inside Zach's ordeal for a minute, because Zach getting in trouble surprised the heck out of me.

Speaker 26 I had met Zach years before.

Speaker 29 When Dana and I first visited Guantanamo in 2015, Zach was part of our tour.

Speaker 3 He was one of the approved people media could interview.

Speaker 7 Do you only go by your first name, last name?

Speaker 10 I only go by Zach, the cultural advisor.

Speaker 90 Yes, ma'am.

Speaker 25 His full name was Ahmed Zaki Janim, but at Guantanamo, he was just Zach for security reasons, he told us.

Speaker 20 Everyone at Guantanamo knew Zach.

Speaker 3 Besides Carol and the detainees themselves, he was one of the very few permanent people there.

Speaker 29 He lived with his family on the base.

Speaker 18 He'd been hired in 2005, during the Bumgarner era, as a cultural advisor to the JTF.

Speaker 11 He's originally from the Middle East, he's Muslim, and his job, he said, was to help the JTF commanders understand the mindset and behavior of the prisoners, and also to train incoming guards on the basics of of Islam.

Speaker 18 Zach was clear, though.

Speaker 35 He worked for the military.

Speaker 14 That's how he talked when we met him back in 2015.

Speaker 90 Whatever I learned from the detainees,

Speaker 90 I pass it all to the leadership. Everything, every word, word by word.

Speaker 22 Zach was trusted, he was dug in.

Speaker 3 He had his own homie office in the headquarters building with all the JTF bigwigs.

Speaker 33 And just to drive home Zach's position at Guantanamo, some of the former detainees we spoke to, they told us they loathed Zach, thought he had it out for them.

Speaker 22 So when I heard that Zach, that same Zach, company man, was forced from his job, I called him up seven years after our first meeting.

Speaker 29 We had a rather aimless conversation for more than two hours until I said, um, so I heard a story about why you left Guantanamo.

Speaker 14 And then, whoa, Zach came alive.

Speaker 13 He spilled over with anger, telling me how he was investigated, but they'd never tell him exactly what for, how he was getting dropped from email chains and standing meetings, how it took him a while to figure out what was going on, that they were squeezing him out.

Speaker 91 For what? You don't like me? Fire me.

Speaker 80 You know?

Speaker 91 Tell me, we don't want you, Zach. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, don't destroy my life and my reputation.
You post my goddamn picture in the camps.

Speaker 91 They posted my picture, you know, as if I'm a terrorist, not to be allowed in the camps. Do not let this person in.
Anytime, if you see this person, report him.

Speaker 56 To clarify, Zach never actually saw his own photo posted, but he said a linguist he knew told him about it.

Speaker 34 You think I'm a terrorist?

Speaker 91 My wife used to substitute teaching at the school, and other teachers will whisper, oh, why is she here? Is she allowed to be here?

Speaker 91 They damage the whole reputation of my family.

Speaker 91 My kids used to work at the dive shop. They hear people whispering.

Speaker 33 And what are the whispers?

Speaker 91 Whispers. Oh, if he thought.

Speaker 91 He's a terrorist, you know, he's in deep shit trouble. You know, he's this, he's that, you know, he has foreign contacts, you know.

Speaker 91 People knew my business without me even knowing it.

Speaker 26 Zach tried to protest his treatment, but the JTF command told him to stop agitating, stop emailing them, don't talk to anyone about this.

Speaker 79 Lay low.

Speaker 91 Now you want me to be quiet? Well, god damn it.

Speaker 91 I stayed quiet for two years.

Speaker 34 Now I'm not being quiet.

Speaker 20 He is not being quiet.

Speaker 91 Fuck you.

Speaker 50 This all started in 2019 when Zach wrote a book about his life and his experience at Guantanamo that he wanted to publish.

Speaker 3 He vetted the final draft through the proper DOD channels, but he believes the book, not the substance of it, but the very idea of it, rubbed the JTF the wrong way.

Speaker 11 Because after that is when the intelligence folks began investigating him.

Speaker 29 They wanted to know where his money was going, who his contacts were, why he was asking for certain reports.

Speaker 22 The investigation dragged on, and for more than a year, Zach was relegated to a do-nothing job in the housing office.

Speaker 63 He spent his time smoking ungodly numbers of cigarettes and trying to understand, why is this happening to me?

Speaker 29 The next time I met up with Zach was about a year later at his house in Florida.

Speaker 24 He was calmer.

Speaker 29 He'd taken out his stress on the front lawn.

Speaker 26 ripped out every blade of grass and covered it in mulch.

Speaker 71 He had some perspective.

Speaker 29 He thinks what happened to him was a combination of petty jealousies, people above him resenting his nice house, his designated parking spot, how he had a direct line to the Admiral.

Speaker 29 Also, he said, a change had fallen over the JTF after Trump's election.

Speaker 37 He noticed right away a harsher tone.

Speaker 29 The JTF leadership, he said, was talking about taking things away from the detainees that they'd had for a decade.

Speaker 46 Things like television, art classes, communal living.

Speaker 74 He said his budget for the detainee library disappeared.

Speaker 29 And he said he was hearing more Islamophobic comments at work.

Speaker 26 It wasn't lost on Zach that what happened to him had also happened to Chaplain James Yee and to the Arabic translators all those years earlier.

Speaker 29 He was suspected of being a spy, treated like a national security threat.

Speaker 74 Another reason he says they turned on him, Carol.

Speaker 24 Zach was the one who brought her up, not me.

Speaker 90 I mean, even I was associated. I don't know if you want to recall this or not.

Speaker 90 I was associated with Carol.

Speaker 90 You know, they had, just like they had Islamophobia, they had Carol phobia.

Speaker 34 Believe me.

Speaker 69 I mean,

Speaker 90 but so what's the everybody was afraid and they keep passing on? Oh, watch out for Carol, watch out for Carol, watch out for Carol.

Speaker 90 Maybe those people are going to hate it the fact that I'm saying this right now.

Speaker 40 Everyone has told me this. Okay.

Speaker 24 See, this is not new.

Speaker 90 So thank you very much. So I'm not the only one who said it.
No. But I kept hearing, you know, Carol knows everything.
Carol knows everything. How does she get information?

Speaker 90 To me, I said, I don't know how she does it. It's not me.

Speaker 33 Wait, who was saying this?

Speaker 90 In meetings, in meetings, you know, like in the admiral meetings, you know, the, you know, the official meetings, okay?

Speaker 23 So it would be like some newspaper story would come out and they would be like, where is she getting this stuff?

Speaker 65 Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 90 I was getting accused without me knowing.

Speaker 11 Accused of leaking information.

Speaker 45 But Zach didn't cotton on.

Speaker 37 Instead, he defended her.

Speaker 70 He says he repeatedly told the leadership that in his experience, Carol had always acted above board, never asked him for information she knew he wasn't allowed to tell.

Speaker 74 As you can probably hear, Zach's a big smoker.

Speaker 28 Carol used to smoke too. They'd see each other sometimes at the little smoking area out in the parking lot of the JTF headquarters building.

Speaker 29 Zach thinks maybe that's what sparked the rumors.

Speaker 28 A few months before Daniel Bernardi arrived on the island, Zach went to pick up some dinner at a pair of restaurants in the bowling alley called Spins and Bombers.

Speaker 11 Less than an hour later, Zach sent an email to Maria, she of the microwave, the spooked public affairs officer Daniel would soon replace.

Speaker 45 Ma'am, he wrote, just for your situational awareness, while I was at Spins and Bombers around 8.45 p.m.

Speaker 29 with my wife, Carol and two other female journalists sat at our table while we were waiting for our to-go food.

Speaker 17 Mainly, Carol talked to my wife.

Speaker 29 He goes on to explain all the benign topics they chatted about.

Speaker 48 Our food got ready and me and my wife excused ourselves and left.

Speaker 21 Carol did not try anything.

Speaker 22 She stayed professional. She complained about herself quitting smoking.
Again, above for your situational awareness.

Speaker 55 Sincerely, Zach.

Speaker 50 This was the atmosphere.

Speaker 62 He felt he had to narc.

Speaker 90 Because they were watching me. Because I don't want somebody, some idiot, to go back while Zach was sitting with the media.
And particularly Carol, yes.

Speaker 48 Daniel Bernardi and Zach overlapped at Guantanamo.

Speaker 46 Daniel had heard about Zach and his banishment.

Speaker 22 He'd been told it had something to do with the book he wrote.

Speaker 22 Daniel definitely understood the leadership's antipathy toward Carol, but he didn't really get how dangerous it was to stick up for her, as Zach had done.

Speaker 5 I remember one time I stood up and said,

Speaker 5 we should not be afraid of this person.

Speaker 5 And I think I might have, you know, put a little macho into that.

Speaker 5 and said, you know, why are we afraid of this woman from the New York Times?

Speaker 65 She's just doing her job.

Speaker 14 He had a little bit of a grow-a-pair tone, he said, which not welcome coming from a public affairs officer.

Speaker 79 They're not generally considered the alphas of the military.

Speaker 30 Before long, Daniel, too, was under investigation.

Speaker 5 Yeah, so the jack comes in and says, give me your badge.

Speaker 5 They have another officer escort me out.

Speaker 74 Which was humiliating, he said.

Speaker 24 Same as Zach.

Speaker 14 Give me your badge. Get out.

Speaker 29 At first, Daniel was investigated for a spill of classified information. It turned out there was no spill.

Speaker 73 But then, as with Zach, they kept digging for close to five months.

Speaker 22 Daniel couldn't do his job or enter the JTF area, but he could play chess and work out and otherwise try to fend off depression.

Speaker 28 On a hike, a colleague told him the stories going around, that Daniel was a spy, or that he was secretly making a movie about Guantanamo.

Speaker 29 He does make documentaries, but this was made up.

Speaker 57 And one more, one that actually did make it into an investigative report.

Speaker 11 That he had leaked information to the media on two occasions.

Speaker 29 None of the accusations against Daniel was substantiated.

Speaker 26 Same was true for Zach, by the way.

Speaker 23 I don't know Southcom's perspective on these investigations.

Speaker 26 They didn't answer my questions about them and didn't provide anyone for me to interview for this story.

Speaker 14 When his tour of duty was up, Daniel went back to California.

Speaker 11 And after 26 years in the military, he decided to quit.

Speaker 56 It took the Navy two and a half more years to approve his retirement, to confirm he hadn't hadn't done anything wrong.

Speaker 43 As for Zach, the military finally offered him a lump sum of money if he promised not to sue.

Speaker 79 It wasn't much.

Speaker 22 He and his wife, Amy, called me as they were deciding whether to accept it.

Speaker 28 Amy was even more upset than Zach.

Speaker 26 She said it felt like a slap in the face.

Speaker 92 They want to, till the last minute they're going to cover their asses.

Speaker 81 Yeah.

Speaker 92 This, it's like what? Nobody even say,

Speaker 92 sorry. You know? Yeah.
That hurts.

Speaker 92 I'm sorry, I'm sorry. When I get, you know, some sometimes Zach says, like, Amy, calm, calm down.
It's like, no, seriously.

Speaker 71 No, don't apologize. Don't apologize.

Speaker 47 They ended up accepting the money.

Speaker 63 About six weeks later, Zach sent me a video of his oldest son, Shahar, joining the army.

Speaker 93 Against all enemies. Against all enemies.
Foreign and domestic.

Speaker 72 Zach was very proud of him.

Speaker 12 I asked Daniel Bernardi about five times.

Speaker 34 Why, though?

Speaker 70 What was the threat that you or Zach or the other public affairs officers presented?

Speaker 3 Again, so many secrets were already out.

Speaker 7 You could say the word torture in open court.

Speaker 47 Camp 7 was no longer a taboo subject.

Speaker 66 Only a few dozen detainees were left at the prison, and their identities and histories, even their health afflictions, were in large part public knowledge.

Speaker 28 So what was the command afraid of?

Speaker 26 I tried to ask the people in charge at the time, the Admiral, his chief of staff, also a couple of public affairs officers.

Speaker 23 They either declined or didn't respond.

Speaker 79 Daniel didn't know the answer, but he had opinions.

Speaker 73 After Admiral Ring was fired, he said, no senior person wanted to get fired.

Speaker 41 And they thought the surefire way to get fired was negative press.

Speaker 35 But if the press isn't covering Guantanamo, then there can't be the kind of negative press that can get me fired.

Speaker 5 So I'm going to shut it down.

Speaker 5 And I'm not going to say it because I don't have

Speaker 5 the, I don't, you know, I'm not going to say it, maybe they don't have the authority to do that. I'm just going to make it happen.

Speaker 5 There was just this utmost interest in trying to keep media from covering Gitmo and hoping that if you stuck your head deep in that,

Speaker 5 Cuban sand, the media would drop interest.

Speaker 81 In other words, if I can't officially institute a no media policy, then I'll do the next best thing.

Speaker 29 Strangle all avenues by which information travels out of this place.

Speaker 69 So

Speaker 5 I guess what I'm saying to you is I got accused of a whole bunch of things that were literally bullshit, that were never brought, nothing, and I believe it was to keep me out of my job.

Speaker 23 A couple other public affairs officers I talked to from around that time, they seconded Daniel's analysis, that some of the powerful people running Guantanamo didn't want any coverage at all.

Speaker 31 The roadblocks that make reporting from Guantanamo difficult, those are intentional.

Speaker 33 One person told me, the idea is, quote, you can't control what Carol writes, but you can control her access.

Speaker 72 What that looks like after the break.

Speaker 5 It's your headline to unpack.

Speaker 57 It's your one story to follow week by week.

Speaker 91 It's your whirdle to work through.

Speaker 75 It's your team to track.

Speaker 3 It's your 36 hours to explore.

Speaker 88 It's your marinade to master.

Speaker 5 It's your opinion to figure out.

Speaker 84 It's your mattress to upgrade.

Speaker 53 It's your day to know what else you need to know today.

Speaker 5 The New York Times.

Speaker 2 It's your world to understand.

Speaker 5 Find out more at nytimes.com slash your world.

Speaker 29 The situation Daniel Bernardi described, a military choking off media, that is still playing out at Guantanamo.

Speaker 21 It's not subtle.

Speaker 51 The JTF even changed its mission statement.

Speaker 26 Used to be safe, humane, legal, and transparent care and custody of detainees.

Speaker 70 A few years ago, they quietly dropped the word transparent.

Speaker 26 The JTF right now is possibly the least transparent it's ever been.

Speaker 19 Carol has dragged maybe three prison-related facts out of Southcom since 2021, which obviously hasn't stopped her from reporting.

Speaker 28 Carol's one of the best reporters in the world.

Speaker 49 She's not about to let a bureaucracy, military or otherwise, dictate her coverage.

Speaker 48 But the prison operation will not give her an ounce of cooperation, will not engage with her, as if no outsider is entitled to know what goes on inside.

Speaker 18 Now, if Carol calls Southcom to ask a question about the prison, the answer she gets back, at best, is, we'll get back to you.

Speaker 48 She can't speak to any non-public affairs personnel without prior approval.

Speaker 16 These aren't Carol's specific rules, obviously.

Speaker 44 They apply to all media, but Carol's the reporter they most affect.

Speaker 73 Since the JTF shut down media tours, in practice, this means no one working there, none of the 900-some people, is permitted to speak to her, on duty or off.

Speaker 19 She hasn't been able to speak to a JTF commander since 2019.

Speaker 13 She can't get a photo, really any photo, not even of a sunset, without her handler's okay.

Speaker 29 She can't get inside the prison compound.

Speaker 12 No reporters are allowed anymore.

Speaker 11 And on the rest of the base, she can't seek casual comment from a soldier or sailor going about their day.

Speaker 41 Maybe if she had approval, she could, but there's no one to grant that approval.

Speaker 75 There's no longer an on-site public affairs officer for the prison.

Speaker 78 It's true, there is no one on the 45 square miles of this naval base who can officially answer a reporter's question about the prison, one of the highest-profile operations of the Pentagon.

Speaker 22 Which, needless to say, creates tension.

Speaker 66 So you're the spokesman.

Speaker 64 You can handle the questions?

Speaker 64 You're the spokesman? You can handle the questions?

Speaker 65 No, I'm not the spokesman.

Speaker 57 We're at a media briefing at Guantanamo.

Speaker 16 A review of the ground rules for visiting reporters.

Speaker 28 Carol's been to hundreds of these briefings.

Speaker 30 I've been to three.

Speaker 29 This one is about to become painful.

Speaker 26 Again, it's the four of us, Dana, me, Carol, and John Ryan, in the conference room of the hotel where we're staying.

Speaker 44 Sitting to our right are four public affairs officers.

Speaker 27 One guy, he's with public affairs for the prison, but he's saying, I can't answer your questions, no.

Speaker 22 The next guy, Army Staff Sergeant Corey Krassinger, also with the prison, he pipes up.

Speaker 65 We can take questions and pass them along and get you an answer, but we can't officially answer anything.

Speaker 25 We're liaisons, he says.

Speaker 45 We can pass your questions along.

Speaker 65 And where would you pass them along? Southcom.

Speaker 64 So why wouldn't we just write them directly?

Speaker 65 You can if you want to. Yeah, definitely can.

Speaker 28 Southcom is back in Miami, so Carol's asking, I mean, I can write to Southcom directly, so why would I go through you?

Speaker 65 So what's your function here?

Speaker 76 We're the liaison between Southcom and JTF.

Speaker 64 Just to pass the questions along. Right, yes, ma'am.

Speaker 9 So your job is to hit forward.

Speaker 64 Say again. Your job is to hit forward?

Speaker 22 She's saying, your whole function here is to forward my emails to Southcom?

Speaker 71 To be fair to Carol, she's thinking a bunch of things right now.

Speaker 74 One is, what is the point of all these people down here who have nothing to do?

Speaker 75 What's the cost to taxpayers?

Speaker 43 Another is, maybe they are doing something that they're not telling us.

Speaker 26 Another is, are they going to mess with me somehow, hinder me?

Speaker 34 To be fair to young Corey Krassinger, though, his hackles are up because rude.

Speaker 77 He says, we do more than forward emails.

Speaker 65 We do more than that, but but

Speaker 65 in the public affairs function, yes, we are a liaison between you, the media, and Southcom Public Affairs.

Speaker 64 But what else? What else do you do as public affairs for the JT?

Speaker 65 Things that aren't related to public affairs. So that's...
That are? That are not.

Speaker 78 He will not say what else he does, just other non-public affairs things, things having to do with visitors.

Speaker 74 He also won't say where his office is.

Speaker 64 Where do you sit? Yeah.

Speaker 90 I'm not sure

Speaker 65 why it's so important.

Speaker 3 Moving right along, they tell us about the six approved faces on base who can be named or photographed.

Speaker 11 Or actually, it's five, because one person, the former public affairs officer, has rotated out.

Speaker 39 So five.

Speaker 28 They tell us the names of two.

Speaker 58 For the other three, they have to get back to us.

Speaker 48 In reality, though, the number is zero.

Speaker 29 Because when Carol and John Ryan II have asked to meet with the approved JTF faces, they decline or don't answer.

Speaker 75 You can't get access to them.

Speaker 26 Dana asks if we can take photos of other personnel around the base without showing their faces or identifying them, which was allowed in the past.

Speaker 75 No, says Staff Sergeant Corey Krasinger.

Speaker 65 Yeah, we would prefer that there were no pictures of us.

Speaker 76 Even if it's unidentifiable.

Speaker 65 Yeah.

Speaker 64 So it's a preference, but is it a rule?

Speaker 65 Yes, so we have our own internal policies that with imagery.

Speaker 22 Corey explains that the policy is meant to protect the privacy and security of the service members.

Speaker 16 Right.

Speaker 65 We have kind of a sensitive mission here, and

Speaker 65 they could be a threat.

Speaker 65 If their name was out in the public, people who

Speaker 65 know what's happened here may reach out. It's happened in the past.
So we want to protect our privacy, protect their privacy.

Speaker 64 When has it happened in the past? I'm sorry? When has it happened in the past?

Speaker 65 I don't speculate on exactly when. We just know that this is something that's happened.

Speaker 64 Can you give us a concrete example? No speculation.

Speaker 65 A concrete example of what?

Speaker 64 When it's happened in the past.

Speaker 65 When it's happened in the past? In the past. That was when.

Speaker 64 No, a concrete example of when it has happened in the past.

Speaker 65 Yeah, in the past. I don't have a date for you.

Speaker 69 Oh, boy.

Speaker 23 This goes on for quite a while until our handler, Adam, steps in and tries to smooth it over.

Speaker 24 Carol's not having it.

Speaker 9 And that's more internal security of some.

Speaker 64 No, no, no. The public affairs officer is saying that people have taken photographs, have their photographs taken out, and they have been reached out to.
We're trying to find out when that happened.

Speaker 64 Okay, well we'll get back to you.

Speaker 64 And I don't mean in the past, I mean like the specific example of a photograph that caused someone to be reached out to.

Speaker 65 Our identities are sensitive in nature regarding the work that we do here.

Speaker 65 People have been reached out to in the past because they were identified somehow missing.

Speaker 11 I can't tell if Corey is misunderstanding the question or if he's being obstinate.

Speaker 39 What he seems not to recognize is that Carol is scrapping for a reason.

Speaker 30 Big reason.

Speaker 18 Severely Severely limiting photography here is a big deal, but there's no bridging worlds here.

Speaker 29 Carol believes Guantanamo belongs to us, to the United States of America, and that we should all know and see what goes on here.

Speaker 29 Corey, and I admit I'm making an assumption here, but he seems to believe Guantanamo belongs to them, to the military.

Speaker 31 And we reporters are whiny, troublesome guests.

Speaker 43 And just to add, this something happened thing, Carol sees it as Guantanamo's version of an urban myth.

Speaker 29 As if the remnants of al-Qaeda are out there scouring the newspaper, identifying low-level Guantanamo personnel so they can hunt them down back home when no evidence that's ever happened.

Speaker 32 Not as far as I know, or as far as Carol knows either.

Speaker 18 And she's been hearing this particular doozy for years.

Speaker 64 And they believe it.

Speaker 63 It's tiring.

Speaker 64 And any ability to sort of challenge

Speaker 58 The attempts to undermine Carol, to get rid of her, have evolved along with Guantanamo.

Speaker 26 The first attempt was almost gentlemanly.

Speaker 25 Carol's then-editor told me that Rick Bacchus, the general in charge of detainee operations in 2002, called him in Miami and asked if he'd send someone else.

Speaker 7 His reason?

Speaker 56 Carol knew more than their public affairs people and was embarrassing them in front of the other correspondents.

Speaker 29 In 2006, they claimed she came to the island without permission.

Speaker 15 She did have permission.

Speaker 22 In 2009, a Navy commander insisted she'd verbally harassed him and demanded her newspaper investigate.

Speaker 26 They did and found no harassment.

Speaker 29 Mostly, these attempts have been a nuisance, a stressful distraction.

Speaker 39 But one last story about Carol, because about halfway through her time here, well, who knows what's halfway, Guantanamo will likely outlast Carol, but a while back, this place almost broke her.

Speaker 64 You know, I was banned for life some years ago for writing something.

Speaker 64 And

Speaker 25 that changed me.

Speaker 44 She was covering the legal case of a young Canadian detainee.

Speaker 25 This was in 2010.

Speaker 29 A witness in the case was going to testify.

Speaker 42 The Guantanamo court identified him only as interrogator number one.

Speaker 22 But this interrogator had already come forward in the Toronto Star.

Speaker 74 His identity was public.

Speaker 71 So in her story, Carol also named him.

Speaker 22 She didn't do it gratuitously.

Speaker 28 There was a news reason.

Speaker 22 The guy had previously pleaded guilty to abusing prisoners in Afghanistan, one of whom died.

Speaker 29 But the Pentagon claimed she and the Canadian reporters had violated the military court's protective order, as well as the media ground rules for covering the Guantanamo military commissions, and they banned her permanently.

Speaker 29 They told the Miami Herald, you can send someone else if you want, just not Carol.

Speaker 64 And I was like, I'm done.

Speaker 64 And I didn't know what to do.

Speaker 66 Carol had gotten the feeling that the Herald was wearying of her close coverage by that point.

Speaker 70 They took a lot of grief for it.

Speaker 3 She worried her bosses might seize the opportunity to throw in the towel.

Speaker 22 She called an editor, and he made some calls, and soon her cell phone rang.

Speaker 29 She was at her mother's house in Connecticut.

Speaker 75 She stepped outside to take it.

Speaker 57 On the phone was a First Amendment attorney named Dave Schultz.

Speaker 16 He would represent her, he said.

Speaker 56 He told her he had a couple of ideas for how to fight this man, including the First Amendment.

Speaker 64 First thing I said to him is:

Speaker 39 this is where I cry.

Speaker 39 Always.

Speaker 39 Don't look at me.

Speaker 64 He said to me,

Speaker 64 I said to him, you know, Dave, they say the Constitution doesn't apply down there. He's like, we're going to get you back in there.
They violated your constitutional rights. And I said,

Speaker 64 They say the Constitution doesn't apply down there.

Speaker 18 Why does it make you cry?

Speaker 22 Seriously, why does it make you cry?

Speaker 32 The answer makes me cry.

Speaker 34 So awful.

Speaker 64 I hate this.

Speaker 64 He said, oh, Carol.

Speaker 39 I fucking hate this.

Speaker 64 I can't do it because you're going to use it.

Speaker 39 Let me try and compose myself. I would use it.

Speaker 64 No, I don't want to use it gratuitously.

Speaker 39 I would only use it if it helps make us understand who you are.

Speaker 64 It does, but it's so awful.

Speaker 50 I can't, what I'm really mad at myself is I can never get through it without crying.

Speaker 18 She took a beep.

Speaker 64 He said, oh, Carol,

Speaker 64 you take it with

Speaker 64 something like, now I'm confused because I'm all emotional.

Speaker 64 It's the Constitution.

Speaker 64 You take it wherever you go.

Speaker 39 It travels with you.

Speaker 29 Carol and and I talked about this call for a long time, about 20 minutes.

Speaker 14 Me pushing and pushing to understand why it made her emotional, Carol trying to pin it down.

Speaker 34 Why?

Speaker 13 Why was she crying over the Constitution?

Speaker 74 Why was it so profound?

Speaker 25 It just made me feel so good, she said.

Speaker 34 No, that's not it.

Speaker 51 Now you're making me analyze it.

Speaker 56 I've never had to analyze it before.

Speaker 63 Finally, she got there.

Speaker 48 She had done nothing wrong by naming the interrogator in her story.

Speaker 22 And before she took Dave Schultz's call, she thought that was immaterial, that the Department of Defense could trample her anyway.

Speaker 64 Like, I wasn't guilty.

Speaker 64 Yeah.

Speaker 64 Because I knew the rules. This was not a violation of anything, but I wasn't, I didn't,

Speaker 64 I didn't think it mattered.

Speaker 64 It's a lawless place, and they can do whatever they want down there, and they did it.

Speaker 64 And then now I'm fine. And that guy basically told me I had rights, which I guess I didn't realize until that moment.
I was just sort of fumbling my way through.

Speaker 44 I realized, she said, first of all, that as an American journalist, I have a license to ask questions.

Speaker 26 Sometimes I may be unpleasant about it, but I am here to ask questions on behalf of the American people.

Speaker 22 And I take that really seriously.

Speaker 38 And them trying to stop her, it was motivating, actually.

Speaker 18 Because...

Speaker 64 Because

Speaker 64 fuck them. But, I mean, that's a ridiculous thing to say.
No, they tried to take that away from me for saying something that was true. I'm still angry about it, right?

Speaker 64 And

Speaker 64 I mean, it was like all of the stuff I've articulated about somebody has to watch them and history can't happen without

Speaker 64 journalists reporting it. And what if they had a hearing and nobody came? All of that.
I mean, I think I believed that beforehand, but it crystallized in that moment.

Speaker 64 They tried to tell me I couldn't report something that was true.

Speaker 39 And I kind of believed that maybe the Constitution didn't apply down here.

Speaker 29 Carol added, well, it's still an open legal question whether it applies to the detainees, but like Dave Schultz said, it does apply to her.

Speaker 55 She'd forgotten that.

Speaker 26 Or maybe she'd started to believe all laws were negotiable at Guantanamo.

Speaker 18 It was so.

Speaker 64 It was like the best thing he could have ever told me.

Speaker 26 She says it's why she kept going back instead of turning away at various points.

Speaker 73 Still, she wishes she weren't doing this alone, that she had a bunch of colleagues like in the old days.

Speaker 57 Then she wouldn't be the only one fighting.

Speaker 78 She didn't plan on becoming Guantanamo's forever reporter, but here she is, more or less the last reporter standing, captive to her own expertise, her own sense of duty.

Speaker 73 So, The Crying.

Speaker 52 I told Carol I wouldn't use it unless it helped explain something about her.

Speaker 18 Full disclosure: Carol's a contributing editor on this series, and she's reviewed this script as well, which does not mean she's endorsed every word of it.

Speaker 22 This crying part was the subject of our most protracted back and forth, because I didn't have to use it.

Speaker 39 I had a lot of other takes.

Speaker 28 Carol kept asking to do it again.

Speaker 22 He said, Oh, Carol, both so she could try to remember the precise quote from Dave Schultz, and also so she wouldn't be crying.

Speaker 34 Oh, Carol.

Speaker 20 Carol, even when I was packing up my mic, she was still trying.

Speaker 69 Oh, Carol.

Speaker 65 It travels with you. It goes wherever you go.

Speaker 13 Why was she so intent on not crying?

Speaker 26 Not because she doesn't want to be seen as an emotional person.

Speaker 27 She doesn't care about that.

Speaker 18 What she cares about, some would say single-mindedly, is access to the Guantanamo story.

Speaker 39 Her fear is that if the people who run Guantanamo hear her talk like this, they might think they almost won back then, and that maybe they should try again.

Speaker 29 It is not crazy to think that they might find an excuse to try to get rid of her, or put her back in a tent, or decide that reporters don't need to come to Guantanamo at all.

Speaker 60 Let them watch the court on closed-circuit TV from the States.

Speaker 21 That is not crazy.

Speaker 63 That trip to Guantanamo in 2022, Dana and I left after a week.

Speaker 29 Carol was staying on, but there was someone flying out with us whom she wanted to speak to, a source.

Speaker 81 So she came along to the airport, did her thing, chatted with people, poked around for information, complained about this and that.

Speaker 3 We had time to kill, so we went to one of the galleys for lunch.

Speaker 52 As we boarded a bus to return to the terminal, she looked pensive for a minute.

Speaker 48 She said to me, I've already done what I came to do, so I don't really need to be here except to stir the pot and be a pain in the ass.

Speaker 62 I can't help myself.

Speaker 23 It's terrible, right?

Speaker 33 It's terrible.

Speaker 72 I can't stop.

Speaker 48 But I'm outraged all the time.

Speaker 29 She was laughing as she said it, but only a little.

Speaker 23 So what happens when a prisoner decides to tell his own story about one of the United States' biggest secrets?

Speaker 13 His treatment in CIA custody?

Speaker 12 That's next time.

Speaker 22 Serials produced by Jessica Weisberg, Dana Chivis, and me.

Speaker 75 Our editor is Julie Snyder.

Speaker 15 Additional reporting by Cora Currier. Fact-checking by Ben Phelan.

Speaker 52 Music supervision, sound design, and mixing by Phoebe Wang.

Speaker 22 Original score by Sophia Dele-Alessandri.

Speaker 71 Editing help from Ira Gloss.

Speaker 32 Our contributing editors are Carol Rosenberg and Rosina Ali.

Speaker 57 Additional production from Emma Grillo and Daniel Guimet.

Speaker 20 Our standards editors are Susan Wesling and Aisha Khan. Legal review from Alamein Sumar and Maya Gandhi.

Speaker 55 The art for our show comes from Pablo Delcan and Max Guter. Supervising producer for Ciro Productions is Nde Chubu.

Speaker 26 Our executive assistant is Mac Miller.

Speaker 44 Sam Dolnick is deputy managing editor of the New York Times.

Speaker 51 Special thanks to Mark Seibel, Dave Schultz, and Janet Reitman, and to all the journalists and writers whose reporting helped inform this series, including, but definitely not limited to, Charlie Savage, Michelle Shepard, Arun Rath, Margo Williams, Ben Fox, Lawrence Wright, Jane Mayer, Jess Braven, Ben Taub, Karen Greenberg, Dana Priest, Steve Call, Terry McDermott, Tim Golden, Peter Bergen, Spencer Ackerman, Sarah Merck, and everyone involved in Guantanamo Voices.

Speaker 21 And John Ryan has a forthcoming book, America's Trial, Torture, and the 9-11 Case on Guantanamo Bay.