# 9/11 at 25: Guantánamo Never Closed. Now It Holds Immigrants

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/banterly-7063015/9-11-at-25-guant-namo-never-closed-now-it-holds-immigrants
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/banterly-7063015/9-11-at-25-guant-namo-never-closed-now-it-holds-immigrants.md
Podcast: [Banterly](https://stenobird.com/podcast/banterly-7063015)
Published: 2026-09-01T09:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/9-11-at-25-guantanamo-never-closed-now-it-holds-immigrants--74779427
Audio file: https://api.spreaker.com/download/episode/74779427/almir3792928446.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/banterly-7063015/episodes/9-11-at-25-guant-namo-never-closed-now-it-holds-immigrants
Duration seconds: 3394

## Resource

Twenty-five years after September 11th, Guantánamo Bay is still open. Fifteen men are still held there. Six have never been charged with anything at all. And on August 26, 2026, a military judge finally set a trial date for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three co-defendants: June 5, 2028, nearly 27 years after the attacks. In the first episode of Immigrantly's three-part 9/11 at 25 series, Saadia Khan sits down with Shayana Kadidal, Senior Managing Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who has litigated Guantánamo cases since 2002. He filed the first habeas petition on behalf of detainees when no one in Washington would carry the papers to the courthouse. He was one of the first lawyers allowed onto the base. This conversation covers what actually built Guantánamo and what has kept it standing through four presidencies: • Why the first people held at Guantánamo were not Muslims, but Black Haitian refugees intercepted at sea in 1991• How the U.S. filled the prison using leaflets and $5,000 bounties, not battlefield capture• The domestic sweeps of South Asian and Arab Muslim men, held in secret immigration hearings with their names erased from the public docket• Mohammed al-Qahtani, a schizophrenic man held roughly two decades, much of it in solitary confinement, and Abu Zubaydah, the first man waterboarded, still never charged• Guled Duran, cleared for release by six agencies, whose habeas petition has sat with a judge for a decade• Why the torture evidence argument is not the reason these cases never went to trial• And what it means that the Trump administration flew roughly 500 immigrants to Guantánamo between February and June 2025, at a reported cost of about $100,000 per person per day The machinery built in 2001 was never dismantled. Machinery that isn't d…

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## Transcript

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