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Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — Like many articles, our project on Sunday’s newspaper on the early secret Pentagon photographs of the 2002 US detention operation began with hints.
Somewhere in the Pentagon there was a pile of photos taken by photographers from the Elite Combat Camera Unit, someone who worked in prison told me last year. Military photographers spent months recording events in Guantanamo Bay in the first year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The picture was taken for senior Pentagon leaders, especially for Defense Minister Donald H. Rumsfeld, who had a personal interest in the detention center. And they were definitely not intended for the general public to see.
I remembered January 11, 2002, when the first prisoner arrived at this remote base from Afghanistan. I was one of a group of journalists who were allowed to watch from above the runway when the prisoners were pulled away from the steel. Gray freighter — handcuffed, masked and matched with an orange uniform. Photographer Tim Chapman, a colleague of the nearby Miami Herald, was frustrated walking around our vantage point. He was not allowed to hold the camera and record the moment. Surprisingly, he found a military photographer on the runway where he wanted to be.
About a week later, when the military released five photographs, including ones that became symbolic of Guantanamo Bay, the world released the work of one of those photographers, Navy NCO Shane T. McCoy. You will get a glimpse. Inside the enclosure chain-linked on the opening day.
And almost 20 years later, I learned that from that time on, more photos were sent from Guantanamo to the Pentagon. On a winter day in Washington, the search for those images began.
One Pentagon office sent me to another.
Some people pointed me to the Library of Congress. Others were convinced that some photos had landed at the National Archives, and it turned out to be true.
I submitted a series of requests under the Information Disclosure Act, followed by phone calls and emails, and eventually learned about various collections containing Guantanamo materials. Many of them are classified.
And one day this year, the archivist sent the news that some materials were already declassified. A zip file arrived in the email, and a picture of a man in an orange uniform was scattered on the computer screen.
I understand some of what I saw in the first year images posted in the Times because I was reporting at the base at the time. But other things confused me and I had to dig.
I explained to Marisa Schwartz Taylor, a photo editor at the Times in Washington, what I had to do. We looked at the pictures together and agreed that this was something special. A FOIA return that starts a reporting task rather than ending it. She made her first edit, asked many questions and guided me on my path. She joined The Times digital news designer Rebecca Lieberman and teamwork began.
Rebecca in New York, Marisa in Washington, and primarily Miami Beach or Guantanamo, scrutinized the images and decided that more information was needed to understand the situation. Rebecca created a design to annotate the photos and provided the reader with a guide to what they were seeing.
I contacted a retired soldier who had worked in prison from the beginning. Many of the people I wrote and called were intrigued. Some people rubbed me. They didn’t talk about the early days of military missions that had been suffering for years.
Dallas-based photographer Jeremy Rock retired from the Air Force after a well-known career in combat cameras, but was excited when I contacted him. He wondered when the world could see his work from that day on.
Carol Rosenberg has been reporting from US naval bases and military prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba since 2002. She joined the New York Times in 2019.