Lisa Hajjar in Markaz Review:
Since 2010, I have been to Guantánamo 13 times. I can’t go as a scholar conducting research or a concerned citizen, so I go as a journalist. When I tell people that I am heading off to Guantánamo, responses tend to range from bafflement to curiosity. Highly educated and politically-aware acquaintances have said things like: “oh, I forgot that place was still open” and “what’s going on there these days?” The symbolic nadir of the US “war on terror” has faded in popular consciousness without actually fading away. Guantánamo is still open, and one of the things going on there (although disrupted, like everything else, by the global Covid pandemic) is the military commission case against five men charged with plotting the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Those attacks triggered the “war on terror” which is now approaching its twentieth anniversary. The 9/11 case, which started in 2008 and then restarted in 2011, was supposed to provide justice for the thousands of people killed on that terrible day.
More here.