天空晴朗蔚蓝。灰色的塔楼矗立在通往国家的大门处，既守卫又欢迎。撞击、大火、浓烟不知从哪里冒出来，然后塔楼消失了。当尘埃和火焰最终散去，一个新的世界出现了。
死亡和毁灭定义了那个夏末的日子，并在那些经历了2001年9月11日的人的脑海中留下了烙印。从灰烬和废墟中崛起了一个新的美国:一个被伤疤重新定义、以新的战时现实为标志的社会——最近几天，原教旨主义伊斯兰统治在酝酿袭击的遥远土地上死灰复燃，这一阴影变得更加黑暗。
20年后，7000多万美国人自恐怖袭击的严峻考验后出生九一一事件遗骸。从机场安全到平民治安，再到日常生活中最不经意的部分，我们几乎不可能找到不受2001年那些恐怖时刻影响的事物。
本周，美国广播公司新闻回顾了9/11袭击并展开他们的余波，深入审视在毁灭后诞生的美国。《9/11二十年后:最长的阴影》是由乔治·斯特凡诺普洛斯讲述的五集系列纪录片。9月6日至10日，美国广播公司新闻直播将在袭击20周年纪念日之前的每晚播出剧集。该系列将在9月11日星期六的纪念仪式后全面重播。
第四部分:不审判，不定罪，不释放
2001年底，当警察到达拉赫达尔·布梅丁在波斯尼亚的办公室时，布梅丁说“他们答应给他几分钟”的时间。
20年后，在世界另一端的一个设防岛屿军事基地遭受了多年不公正的苦难后，布梅丁说，现实很清楚:“他们毁了我的生活。”
在911后疯狂追捕恐怖分子的过程中关塔那摩湾美国海军基地被当时的国防部长唐纳德·拉姆斯菲尔德称之为“最不糟糕的选择”，安置在官员们称之为新的全球反恐战争中抓获的恐怖嫌疑分子。
在其鼎盛时期，该设施关押了800人，据称每个人都与恐怖分子或恐怖组织有不同程度的联系。根据美国情报，一些居民是反西方恐怖主义的顽固老兵，包括一些所谓的911袭击的策划者和组织者。有些人与可疑的恐怖分子有着虽然具体但却很微妙的联系。还有一些人只是在错误的时间出现在错误的地点。
对鲍梅丁来说，仅仅是和一个已知的基地组织恐怖分子的兄弟一起工作，就可能让他在监狱里呆了7年半，对许多人来说，这已经成为美国应对2001年9月11日劫持和杀戮的错误和过激行为的象征。
“20年后，我找不到关塔纳摩监狱背后的真相，”鲍梅丁说。
关塔那摩位于迈阿密东南约500英里处，横跨古巴海岸的一片原始海岸线。从许多方面来看，这个基地看起来和感觉上都像一个佛罗里达小镇，有美丽的海滩、一家爱尔兰酒吧和一家麦当劳。它在1992年汤姆·克鲁斯的电影《几个好人》中获得了一点名气，但现在它在世界范围内被认为是美国最黑暗时期的家园。
“任何不了解关塔那摩的人，我想今天都会对那里发生的一些事情感到惊讶，”美国联邦调查局前国家安全副总法律顾问马里恩·斯派克·鲍曼说。
尽管多年来公众对那里的战俘营的条件表示强烈抗议，对其存在的法律依据也存在争议，但仍有39名被拘留者被关押在其围墙内。
乔治·w·布什和比尔·克林顿执政期间，美国国家安全委员会前反恐高级官员罗杰·克雷西(Roger Cressey)表示:“建立关塔那摩监狱一开始就是正确的行动。“然后它变成了弗兰肯斯坦的怪物。”
正如许多人所知，Gitmo并不是一个怪物，而是一个合法的“黑洞”。前官员表示，关塔那摩是出于必要而生的，因为它是一个关押那些在美国袭击阿富汗时需要被关押和审问的人的地方，目的是摧毁实施9/11袭击的恐怖网络。
布什政府认定，9·11袭击更像是战争行为，而不是犯罪，因此那些因9·11事件被捕的人将是“敌方战斗人员”，他们将在军事法庭受审，而不是在美国法律体系中受到宪法保护并在民事法庭受审的罪犯。
“我们担心将这些恐怖分子带到美国有几个原因，”阿尔韦托·冈萨雷斯说，他是前布什白宫法律顾问和美国司法部长，深入参与了决策。“我们觉得美国人民不会容忍这些恐怖分子出现在美国的土地上。我们也不确定一旦他们在美国土地上，他们会自动获得哪些权利——宪法权利。”
美国国务卿科林·鲍威尔的前参谋长、退役上校劳伦斯·威尔克森说，布什政府试图“以美国法律体系之外的方式处理他们”。
关塔那摩湾是答案。被拘留者将被转移到拘留设施，在那里他们将受到审讯，然后在所谓的“军事委员会”中接受审判，这是标准审判和军事法庭之间的交叉，在战争时期使用过，尽管很少使用。在9月11日的几个月内，布什发布命令，指示拉姆斯菲尔德组织委员会，有效地规避了美国法院系统。此外，拉姆斯菲尔德还在2002年底批准了18种审讯手段，这些手段可以用于据称正在反抗的被拘留者，包括掌掴和剥夺睡眠。
这两项命令将界定关塔那摩，并成为围绕美国以反恐战争的名义采取的行动展开辩论的背景，这场战争仍在继续。
冈萨雷斯说，当时，“人们非常担心第二波”袭击，“并对此保持警惕”。据鲍曼说，正是这种收集可能的后续袭击情报的紧迫感导致了关塔那摩最严重的虐待行为，鲍曼也曾是海军情报官员和助理法官辩护律师。鲍曼最终试图说服五角大楼官员放弃据称在那里发生的虐待行为，但没有成功。
正是在这种绝望的情况下，美国官员求助于提取信息的黑暗手段被一些人称之为“强化审讯”，被另一些人称之为“折磨”。由于担心更多的袭击，美国官员寻求批准这些技术，包括极端的身体和心理压力。
新批准的审讯方法为政府内部的激烈冲突埋下了伏笔。这场争端让两组调查人员相互对立，一组来自军方，另一组主要由情报官员组成。
军方调查人员，被称为刑事调查特别工作组，试图从被拘留者中剔除无辜者。被称为关塔那摩联合特遣部队的情报官员被派去审问被拘留者，以获取有关未来恐怖阴谋的信息。据文件和法庭案例显示，他们在审讯中缺乏经验，据称对拒绝审讯的被拘留者实施了严重虐待，然后追溯性地试图通过法律漏洞为他们的方法辩护。
许多专家，包括代表关塔那摩囚犯的律师苏珊·伯克，仍然不相信这些方法的合法性。
伯克说:“众所周知，你不能折磨人。“那么，这个概念，不知何故，因为我们使用‘全球反恐战争’的白话，我们可以对其他人类做任何我们想做的事情?完全非法。”
鲍曼越来越担心驻古巴的特工向联邦调查局总部汇报他们在911袭击一年后目睹的事情。根据联邦调查局的一份文件，这些报道描述了对穆斯林被拘留者的身体虐待和性化身体接触，以及用胶带封住一名囚犯的头，迫使另一名囚犯在充满光线的牢房里呆几个月而没有黑暗，造成了“极度的心理创伤”。
鲍曼说，至关重要的是，强有力的获取情报的手段最初并不起作用，随后破坏了收集可靠信息的努力——最终塑造了公众对该阵营的形象。
鲍曼说:“他们想做他们认为比联邦调查局建立融洽关系的活动更快获得信息的事情。“我的问题是，他们使用的技术在审讯中从未被证明是有效的。”
鲍梅丁说，他仍然记得一个特别的夜晚——他在关塔那摩监狱x光拘留中心的早期——当时他说“他们试图打碎我。”
“凌晨两点，巡官对士兵们说，‘来吧，让他跑起来，’”布迈丁说。“他们强迫我和他们一起跑，但我跑不了，因为我戴着手铐。我不能和他们一起跑。当我摔倒的时候，他们会拉着我沿着沙砾前行……如果我记得的话，每天都是这样，十天，十五天。”
在华盛顿，关于攻击性审讯手段的争议，包括这些手段是否是非法的酷刑以及它们是否是有效的情报收集工具的问题，让位给了一场关于法律依据的斗争，以及这些做法是否为1949年日内瓦四公约所允许。日内瓦四公约是一套规范战时使用武力的协议。考虑到这些要求，官员们甚至对被拘留者使用了特定的术语。
“据我回忆，当时我们没有称他们为战俘，”威尔克森说。“我们称他们为被拘留者，因为那是艺术术语，不代表日内瓦等等。”
冈萨雷斯说，布什政府认为《日内瓦公约》不适用于基地组织恐怖分子，将这些准则解释为“鼓励个人根据战争法作战”，并声称这些规则仅适用于二战后代表签署该条约的近200个国家作战的人。
“因为基地组织没有签署日内瓦公约，”冈萨雷斯认为，“他们不会自动获得保护资格——塔利班也是如此。”
约翰·贝林格是9/11事件中国家安全委员会的首席律师，他说拒绝根据日内瓦公约保护被指控的恐怖分子是一个错误。
他说:“这让我们面临大量的国际批评，指责我们将被拘留者关押在关塔那摩……一个法律黑洞里，一个没有法律的区域。“在某种程度上，这是真的。”
虐待被拘留者的报道使法律难题更加复杂。当拉姆斯菲尔德和其他布什政府官员称赞新的审讯技术时，那些目睹这些技术的人表示了恐惧——新闻报道开始出现，描述了被拘留者被迫忍受的极端条件。
鲍曼在最近的一次采访中说:“拉姆斯菲尔德部长被告知了很多这类事情。“他真的只是把它滚下来。坦率地说，这是在走下坡路。”
2002年11月，拉姆斯菲尔德甚至在一份备忘录的空白处草草记下，授权使用严厉的审讯手段进行“反抵抗”，他说:“我每天站8-10个小时。为什么站立时间限制在4小时?”
美国空军预备役上尉马克·麦卡里(Mark McCary)在关塔那摩担任法官辩护律师，负责确保从每个军事部门的调查机构中抽调的刑事调查工作队审讯人员保持在他们的合法范围内。作为一名专注于反恐十年部署的老兵，他带着装满法律书籍的行李袋来到了岛上基地。他说，他很快了解到的JTF-关塔那摩审讯“不符合我们所接受的美国价值观和原则，包括正义、日内瓦公约以及审讯和培训的基本原则”。
麦卡里与军方领导人对质，写了一系列备忘录，概述了营地的情况，并呼吁进行干预。五角大楼没有理会他们。
“他们不欣赏我的意见或我的法律评估，”他说。
麦卡里被调回了家。他发现，对他和许多被任命为军事法庭辩护律师或检察官的法官辩护律师来说，关塔那摩“是职业生涯的终结”，他说。
他说，与此同时，鲍曼无法说服五角大楼放弃其“强化审讯”计划，于是向媒体求助。2005年初，《纽约每日新闻》刊登了一篇标题为“与GITMO·烧烤大战”的文章
《每日新闻》获悉，“关塔那摩湾恐怖分子监狱的军事律师试图阻止不人道的审讯，但遭到五角大楼高级官员的忽视，”报道中写道。
这篇文章包括了麦卡里写的一份备忘录的细节，概述了监狱集中营的虐待行为。报道援引鲍曼的话称，他将麦卡里描述为“无名英雄”
“我认为人们需要明白，现场有很多人，不仅仅是我这样的华盛顿人，还有现场的人，他们看到了正在发生的事情，他们试图有所作为。我想让大家知道这一点，”他说。
麦卡里在2003年3月离开了他的单位，他说从那以后他就没有和五角大楼或联邦调查局的任何人联系过。他说，他在关塔那摩目睹的一切给他留下了自己的伤疤。
他说:“我希望真的重返工作岗位，但由于医学诊断:双相情感障碍伴有创伤后应激障碍，我不能这样做。“曾经有一段时间，我本可以成为一名无家可归的兽医……我为这一切挣扎不已。”
自911事件以来，20年和三届总统任期已经过去，关塔那摩仍然开放——尽管它是以前的影子。该市最知名的居民哈立德·谢赫·穆罕默德承认策划了9·11袭击，但仍被法律搁置。他被指控在历史上最严重的恐怖袭击中杀害了近3000人，目前正以他的身份等待审判本周案件继续审理在审前动议推迟后。
美国国家反恐中心前主任马特·奥尔森说:“对9·11事件负责的人坐在那里——他们没有受到审判——事实证明，旨在将他们绳之以法的系统是失败的。”奥尔森曾在奥巴马政府时期被指控关闭监狱。
尽管关塔那摩复杂的遗产和它给美国人的良心带来的道德负担，许多对那里发生的事情负责的官员还是改变了他们的决定，并声称目的证明手段是正当的。
“对于20年后的受害者家属，我要说，即使这些人只是被拘留，没有在法庭上被绳之以法，”冈萨雷斯说，“拘留本身也有一定程度的正义。”
其他人的感受不同。
贝林格说:“20年后回顾过去，我认为把对911的反应视为一场战争，一场武装冲突是正确的。“但随后由此产生的决定，军事委员会的成立，不将日内瓦公约适用于我们关押的人的决定——我认为这些都是布什政府犯下的错误。”
2004年，911事件三年后，布梅丁和其他被拘留者终于获得了法律顾问。到2007年，鲍梅丁的案件到达了美国最高法院。法官们确定，布迈丁和其他被拘留者有权获得人身保护令，任何在美国被拘留的人都有权知道他们被逮捕和拘留的原因。一名联邦法官随后认为，鲍梅丁应该被释放，理由是缺乏对他不利的证据。
“然后就结束了，”鲍梅丁说。
“这是我永远不会忘记的一天。”
'The Longest Shadow': Guantanamo Bay and a new rulebook for a new war
The sky was clear and blue. The gray towers stood, both guarding and welcoming, at the gateway to the nation. Out of nowhere came the impact, the blaze, the smoke -- and then the towers were gone. When the dust and flames finally cleared, a new world had emerged.
The death and destruction defined that late summer day and remain seared in the minds of those who lived through Sept. 11, 2001. From the ashes and wreckage rose a new America: a society redefined by its scars and marked by a new wartime reality -- a shadow darkened even more in recent days by the resurgence of fundamentalist Islamist rule in the far-off land that hatched the attacks.
Twenty years later -- with more than 70 million Americans born since the crucible of the attacks -- the legacy of9/11remains. From airport security to civilian policing to the most casual parts of daily life, it would be nearly impossible to identify something that remains untouched and unaffected by those terrifying hours in 2001.
This week, ABC News revisits the9/11 attacksand unwinds their aftermath, taking a deep look at the America born in the wake of destruction. "9/11 Twenty Years Later: The Longest Shadow" is a five-part documentary series narrated by George Stephanopoulos. Episodes will air on ABC News Live each night leading up to the 20th anniversary of the attacks, from Sept. 6-10. The series will be rebroadcast in full following the commemoration ceremonies on Saturday, Sept. 11.
Part 4: No trial, no conviction, no release
When police arrived at Lakhdar Boumediene's office in Bosnia in late 2001, Boumediene says that "they promised just a few minutes" of his time.
Two decades later, after years of unjustified suffering on a fortified island military base halfway around the world, Boumediene says the reality is clear: "They destroyed my life."
In the frenzied post-9/11 hunt for terrorists, theU.S. naval base at Guantanamo Baywas pressed into service as what then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously called the "least worst option" to house suspected terrorists captured in what officials described as the new Global War on Terror.
At its height, the facility held 800 men, each supposedly having varying degrees of ties to terrorists or terrorist groups. According to American intelligence, some of the inhabitants were known to be hardened veterans of anti-Western terrorism, including some of the alleged masterminds and organizers of the 9/11 attacks. Some had tenuous, though concrete, connections to suspected terrorists. And still others were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time.
For Boumediene, merely having worked with a sibling of a known al-Qaeda terrorist may be what earned him a seven-and-a-half-year stay at a jail that has, to many, come to symbolize the mistakes and excesses of America's response to the hijackings and killings of Sept. 11, 2001.
"Twenty years later, I can't find the truth behind my imprisonment in Guantanamo," Boumediene said.
Located some 500 miles southeast of Miami, Guantanamo spans a pristine stretch of shoreline on the Cuban coast. In many ways, the base looks and feels like a small Florida town, complete with beautiful beaches, an Irish pub and a McDonald's. It earned a slice of fame in the 1992 Tom Cruise film "A Few Good Men," but it is now known around the world as the home to some of America's darkest hours.
"Anybody who does not know about Guantanamo I think today would be surprised at some of the things that went on there," said Marion "Spike" Bowman, the former deputy general counsel for national security at the FBI.
Despite years of public outcry over conditions in the prison camp there -- and disputes over the legal justification for its existence -- 39 detainees still remain within its walls.
"The creation of Guantanamo was the right action at the beginning," said Roger Cressey, a former top counterterrorism official on the National Security Council during the administrations of both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. "And then it turned into Frankenstein's monster."
Gitmo, as many know it, wasn't meant to be a monster, but a legal "black hole." Former officials said Guantanamo was born out of necessity as a place to house those who needed to be held and interrogated when the U.S. attacked Afghanistan in order to destroy the terror network that committed the 9/11 attacks.
The Bush administration determined that the Sept. 11 attacks were more akin to acts of war than a crime, so those captured in connection with 9/11 would be "enemy combatants" who would be tried in military courts -- instead of criminals who would have constitutional protections in the American legal system and would be tried in civilian courts.
"We worried about bringing these terrorists into the United States for a couple reasons," said Alberto R. Gonzales, a former Bush White House counsel and U.S. attorney general who was deeply involved in the decision-making. "We felt the American people wouldn't stand for it, to have these terrorists on American soil. We also were unsure about what rights -- constitutional rights -- that they would automatically secure once they were on American soil."
The Bush administration sought to "deal with them in a way that was out of the U.S. legal system," said retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Guantanamo Bay was the answer. The detainees would be transferred to the detention facility, where they would be interrogated and then tried in something called "military commissions," a cross between a standard trial and a military court martial, which had been used -- albeit rarely -- in times of war. Within months of Sept. 11, Bush issued the order directing Rumsfeld to organize the commissions, effectively circumventing the U.S. court system. Separately, Rumsfeld also authorized 18 interrogation techniques in late 2002 that could be used on detainees said to be resisting -- including slapping and sleep deprivation.
The two orders would come to define Guantanamo and serve as the backdrop for the debate over America's actions in the name of a War on Terror that continues to rage.
At the time, "there was a lot of concern about a second wave" of attacks, "and being alert for that," Gonzales said. It was that sense of urgency to gather intelligence on possible follow-up attacks that led to Guantanamo's worst abuses, according to Bowman, who also had been a naval intelligence officer and assistant judge advocate. Bowman eventually attempted unsuccessfully to talk Pentagon officials out of the abuses that allegedly occurred there.
It was under those desperate circumstances that American officials resorted to thedarker means of extracting information, called "enhanced interrogation" by some -- and "torture" by others. Fearing more attacks, U.S. officials sought approval for the techniques, which included extreme physical and psychological stresses.
The newly approved interrogation methods set the stage for a dramatic intragovernmental conflict. The dispute pitted two groups of investigators -- one from the military, the other largely made up of intelligence officials -- against one another.
The military investigators, dubbed the Criminal Investigation Task Force, sought to weed out innocents from the detainees. The intelligence officers, called Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, were dispatched to interrogate the detainees for information about future terrorist plots. Largely inexperienced in interrogation, they allegedly inflicted severe abuses on detainees who resisted questioning -- and then retroactively attempted to justify their methods through legal loopholes, according to documents and court cases.
Many experts, including Susan Burke, a lawyer who has represented Guantanamo detainees, remain unconvinced of the legality of the methods.
"It has been well-established that you cannot torture people," said Burke. "So, this notion that, somehow, because we use the vernacular of 'Global War on Terror,' that we can do whatever we want to other human beings? Wholly illegal."
Bowman became increasingly concerned by what agents based in Cuba were reporting back to FBI headquarters about what they had been witnessing a year after the 9/11 attacks. The dispatches described physical abuse and sexualized physical contact with the Muslim detainees, as well as duct-taping one prisoner's head and forcing another to remain in a cell flooded with light for months without darkness, causing "extreme psychological trauma," according to one FBI document.
Critically, Bowman said, the forceful means to extract intelligence didn't work in the first place, and then subsequently undermined efforts to gather reliable information -- ultimately shaping the public's image of the camp.
"They wanted to do what they thought would be faster to get information than the FBI's rapport-building type of activity," Bowman said. "My problem was the techniques they were using were not techniques that had ever been proven to be effective in interrogation."
Boumediene says he can still recall one night in particular -- during his early days at Guantanamo's Camp X-Ray detention compound -- when he says "they tried to break me."
"At two o'clock in the morning, the inspector said to the soldiers, 'Come on, make him run,'" Boumediene said. "They forced me to run with them, but I couldn't run because I was handcuffed. I couldn't run with them. When I would fall, they would pull me along the gravel … if I remember, ten days, 15 days like that, every day."
In Washington, the dispute over aggressive interrogation techniques, including questions of whether they were illegal torture and if they were an effective instrument of intelligence-gathering, gave way to a fight over the legal justifications -- and whether such practices were permissible under the Geneva Conventions, a 1949 set of agreements regulating the use of force during wartime. Mindful of those requirements, officials even used a specific nomenclature for those being held.
"We weren't calling them prisoners of war at that time, as I recall," Wilkerson said. "We were calling them detainees, because that was the term of art that didn't bespeak Geneva and so forth."
The Bush administration made the case that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaeda terrorists, interpreting those guidelines as "an incentive to individuals to fight according to laws of war," Gonzales said, and asserting that the rules applied only to those fighting on behalf of the nearly 200 nations that signed the treaty in the wake of World War II.
"Because al-Qaeda had not been a signatory to the Geneva Conventions," Gonzales argued, "they would not automatically qualify for the protections -- and the same thing with the Taliban."
John Bellinger, who was the chief lawyer for the National Security Council on 9/11, said that denying accused terrorists protections under the Geneva Conventions had been a mistake.
"This opened us up to a huge amount of international criticism that we were holding detainees in Guantanamo … in a legal black hole, in a law-free zone," he said. "And to a certain extent, this was really true."
The legal conundrum was compounded by reports of the mistreatment of detainees. As Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials lauded the new interrogation techniques, those who witnessed them expressed horror -- and news reports started to emerge depicting the extreme conditions detainees were forced to endure.
"Secretary Rumsfeld was told about much of this stuff," Bowman said in a recent interview. "He really just rolled it off. And that, frankly, rolls downhill."
In November 2002, Rumsfeld even jotted in the margin of a memo authorizing harsh interrogation techniques for "counter-resistance" by saying, "I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"
U.S. Air Force Reserve Capt. Mark McCary served as a judge advocate at Guantanamo, responsible for ensuring that Criminal Investigation Task Force interrogators drawn from each military branch's investigative agencies remained within their legal bounds. A veteran of a decade of deployments that focused on counterterrorism, he arrived on the island base with a duffle bag filled with law books. What he soon learned of the JTF-Guantanamo interrogations "did not comport with American values and principles that we're trained with, including justice, Geneva Conventions, and the basic equities of interrogation and training," he said.
McCary confronted military leaders and penned a series of memos outlining conditions at the camp and calling for intervention. The Pentagon ignored them.
"They didn't appreciate my opinion or my legal assessment," he said.
McCary redeployed back home. Guantanamo, he found, "was a career-ender" for him and for many judge advocates appointed as defense counsel or prosecutors in the military tribunals, he said.
Meanwhile, Bowman, unable to persuade the Pentagon to abandon its program of "enhanced interrogation," went to the press, he said. In early 2005, the New York Daily News ran a headline, "AT WAR WITH GITMO GRILLING."
"Military lawyers at the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison tried to stop inhumane interrogations but were ignored by senior Pentagon officials, the Daily News has learned," read the story.
The article included details of a memo McCary had written outlining abuses at the prison camp. Bowman, who was quoted as an unidentified source in the story, characterized McCary as an "unsung hero."
"I thought people needed to understand that there were people on the scene, not just in Washington like me, but people on the scene who were seeing what was going on, who were trying to make a difference. And I wanted that known," he said.
McCary left his unit in March of 2003 and says he has not communicated with anyone at the Pentagon or the FBI since. What he witnessed at Guantanamo left him with scars of his own, he said.
"I desired to actually return to duty and could not do that because of a medical diagnosis: bipolar with PTSD," he said. "There was a time where I could've been a homeless vet … I struggled immensely with all of that."
Two decades and three presidential administrations have passed since 9/11, and Guantanamo remains open -- albeit as a shadow of its former self. Its most high-profile inhabitant, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who has confessed to plotting the 9/11 attacks, remains there in legal limbo. He stands charged with killing nearly 3,000 people in the worst terror attack in history, and is awaiting trial as hiscase resumed this weekfollowing a delay in pretrial motions.
"The fact that the individuals responsible for 9/11 are sitting there -- they have not been tried -- the system that was designed to bring them to justice has proven to be a failure," said Matt Olsen, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center who was charged with closing the prison under the Obama administration.
Despite Guantanamo's complicated legacy and the moral burden it placed on the American conscience, many officials responsible for what happened there stand by their decisions -- and claim that the ends justified the means.
"To the families of the victims, 20 years later, I would say that, even though these individuals are simply detained and not brought to justice in a court," Gonzales said, "there is some level of justice in the detention itself."
Others feel differently.
"Looking back 20 years later, I think it was correct to treat the response to 9/11 as a war, as an armed conflict," said Bellinger. "But decisions that were subsequently made that flowed from that, the creation of military commissions, the decision not to apply the Geneva Conventions to the people who we were holding -- I think these were mistakes that were made by the Bush administration."
In 2004, three years after 9/11, Boumediene and other detainees were finally afforded legal counsel. By 2007, Boumediene's case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices determined that Boumediene and other detainees wereentitled to habeas corpus, the constitutional right of anyone detained in America to know the reasons for their arrest and detention. A federal judge then found that Boumediene should be released, citing a lack of evidence against him.
"And then it was over," Boumediene said.
"It is a day I will never forget."
