When the White House was considering the best place to house prisoners who had been captured in the “war on terror” back in 2001, one idea put forward was Alcatraz, the long-abandoned high-security prison in San Francisco Bay.
In the end, however, the administration chose Guantánamo Bay partly because the US naval base on the south-eastern tip of Cuba was beyond the reach of US civil law. The White House hoped Guantánamo would give the military authorities and Central Intelligence Agency unfettered ability to detain and interrogate suspected terrorists picked up in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other parts of the world.
