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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 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, and mostly we wanted to

interrogate them, however we wanted, to find out what they knew, especially about

Al-Qaeda, because we didn't know a ton about Al-Qaeda back then, and we were petrified.

They were about to blindside us again.

So that was the idea.

Guantanamo wouldn't be a traditional POW camp.

It'd be a new thing, with new rules.

...