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Over here at Serial, we love criminal justice stories.

Guantanamo is the most astonishing one we've ever seen.

Guantanamo is a prison and a court. the most astonishing one we've ever seen.

Guantanamo is a prison and a court that we made from scratch

right after September 11th.

We were at war in Afghanistan fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban,

and pretty soon we'd captured thousands of men.

Our makeshift holding cells in Afghanistan couldn't handle them all.

We needed a safe place to keep them, away from the chaos, so we could sort them out. And the place we chose

was Guantanamo Bay, 8,000 miles away from Afghanistan in Cuba. We already had a

sleepy naval base there. We've had it since

1903. There's plenty of room and this part was crucial. The Bush

administration figured because the base was in Cuba on foreign soil, the prisoners we delivered there wouldn't have access to U.S. courts.

That was the innovation.

We wanted Leeway to hold these guys for however long we wanted,

...