Twenty years have passed since the first detainees arrived at Guantánamo Bay. The US detention center is located on a naval base in eastern Cuba. The Cuban government continually calls for its closure and considers it to be located in occupied territory. The prison was built in ninety-six hours after the terrible attacks of September 11, 2001, and has held 780 prisoners. They were of forty-nine different nationalities, mostly Afghans, Saudis, Yemenis, and Pakistanis, and ranged in age from thirteen to eighty-nine when detained. Guantánamo is an impregnable place where torture and impunity were — and presumably still are — the order of the day.

Guantánamo is a demonstration of the worst of a state, the worst of what human beings are capable of inflicting on their fellow human beings. In these two decades, only twelve of the detainees have been prosecuted; of these, only two were convicted by a military commission. Today, thirty-nine people are still in prison, twenty-seven of them without charge. The twenty-seven who have not been charged in all this time remain there, in the belief that they are war detainees in the conflict with al-Qaeda, with no end in sight to their situation. As the newspaper La Vanguardia recently recalled, the trial of the five alleged 9/11 ringleaders, including that of the alleged leader, Khalid Shaykh Mohammed, has still not begun after ten years of preliminary hearings.

In 2002, from court number 5 of the Audiencia Nacional, I issued an indictment against the Spanish citizen Hamed Abderrahaman Ahmed — alias Hamido, imprisoned in Guantánamo — as a member of the Spanish al-Qaeda cell. In December 2003, I issued an arrest warrant. I used this to request his extradition from the United States.