COMMENTARY

Guantanamo: three years on

Three years ago, the world caught its first glimpse of a new breed of prisoners, captured in a new sort of war. They were shackled, orange-suited figures, seen through telephoto lenses, arriving in a makeshift jail on an American base on a tropical island, 8,000 miles from where they had been captured on the battlefield of Afghanistan.

According to US officials at the time, they were “the worst of the worst.” They had been chained to the seats of their transport plane for the journey half way round the world because “these are people who would gnaw through hydraulic lines on a C-17 to bring it down,” General Richard Myers, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, explained in an interview on Jan. 10, 2002, as the first 20 prisoners arrived at Guantanamo Bay in south-eastern Cuba.

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