Abu Zubaydah is a Palestinian citizen and alleged terrorist born in Saudi Arabia currently held by the U.S. in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. He is held under the authority of Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF).
Robert Philip Hanssen was an American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001. His espionage was described by the Department of Justice as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history".
Aldrich Hazen Ames is an American former CIA counterintelligence officer who was convicted of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union and Russia in 1994. He is serving a life sentence, without the possibility of parole, in the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Indiana. Ames was known to have compromised more highly classified CIA assets than any other officer until Robert Hanssen, who was arrested seven years later in 2001.
James Joseph Yee is an American former United States Army chaplain with the rank of captain. He worked as a Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay detention camp and was subjected to an intense investigation by the United States for espionage and other crimes, but all charges were later dropped. Yee later authored a book about his experiences as chaplain, For God and Country.
Jane Meredith Mayer is an American investigative journalist who has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1995. She has written for the publication about money in politics; government prosecution of whistleblowers; the United States Predator drone program; Donald Trump's ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz; and Trump's financial backer, Robert Mercer. In 2016, Mayer's book Dark Money—in which she investigated the history of the conservative fundraising Koch brothers—was published to critical acclaim.
Dorsey & Whitney LLP is an American law firm with over 500 lawyers, and a similar number of staff, located in 21 offices in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. The firm's headquarters is in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where it was founded. As of 2023, Dorsey is led by managing partner William R. Stoeri. The firm's lawyers have included several prominent public figures, including former U.S. Vice President Walter Mondale.
Sadik Ahmad Turkistani is an ethnic Uyghur born and raised in Taif, Saudi Arabia and an opponent of the Taliban. Held by the Taliban in Kandahar prison in Afghanistan, he was briefly freed when they were overthrown in late 2001.
John Bellinger Bellinger III is an American lawyer who served as the Legal Adviser for the U.S. Department of State and the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration. He is now a partner at the Washington, D.C. law firm Arnold & Porter, and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Debevoise & Plimpton LLP is an international law firm headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1931 by Eli Whitney Debevoise and William Stevenson, the firm was originally named “Debevoise, Plimpton & McLean”. Debevoise specializes in private equity, financial services transactions, private funds, and international arbitration. In 2021, the firm assisted the Democratic Party in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump.
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a United States military prison within the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, also referred to as Gitmo, on the coast of Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. As of April 2023, of the 779 people detained there since January 2002 when the military prison first opened after the September 11 attacks, 740 had been transferred elsewhere, 30 remained there, and nine had died while in custody.
Peter Sabin Willett, known as Sabin Willett, is an American lawyer and novelist, a partner with the Philadelphia-based law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, formerly a partner at Bingham McCutchen. He lives near Boston, Massachusetts. He is perhaps best known as a defense lawyer for several Uighur prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp.
Winston Burdett was an American broadcast journalist and correspondent for the CBS Radio Network during World War II and later for CBS television news. During the war he became a member of Edward R. Murrow's team of war correspondents known as the Murrow Boys. From 1937 to 1942 Burdett was involved with the Communist Party. He testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1955, detailing his espionage work for the Soviet Union in Europe and naming dozens of other party members.
Charles Douglas "Cully" Stimson is an American lawyer and government official. Stimson served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs from 2005 until his resignation on February 2, 2007, following a controversy about his statements on legal representation for prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Following his time in the George W. Bush administration, Stimson joined The Heritage Foundation, where he is currently a senior legal fellow and manager of the National Security Law Program. Earlier in his career, Stimson served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia and as Vice President for Private Equity Mergers & Acquisitions at Marsh & McLennan Companies.
Seton Hall report, also known as the Denbeaux study, is any of several studies, published by the Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall University Law School in the United States beginning in 2006, about the detainees and United States government policy related to operations at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. At a time when the government revealed little about these operations, the reports were based on analysis of data maintained and released by the Department of Defense. The director of the Law School's Center, Mark P. Denbeaux, supervised law student teams in their analysis and writing the studies. The first study was Report on Guantanamo Detainees: A Profile of 517 Detainees through Analysis of Department of Defense Data.
"Enhanced interrogation techniques" or "enhanced interrogation" was a program of systematic torture of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and various components of the U.S. Armed Forces at remote sites around the world—including Bagram, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bucharest—authorized by officials of the George W. Bush administration. Methods used included beating, binding in contorted stress positions, hooding, subjection to deafening noise, sleep disruption, sleep deprivation to the point of hallucination, deprivation of food, drink, and medical care for wounds, as well as waterboarding, walling, sexual humiliation, rape, sexual assault, subjection to extreme heat or extreme cold, and confinement in small coffin-like boxes. A Guantanamo inmate's drawings of some of these tortures, to which he himself was subjected, were published in The New York Times. Some of these techniques fall under the category known as "white room torture". Several detainees endured medically unnecessary "rectal rehydration", "rectal fluid resuscitation", and "rectal feeding". In addition to brutalizing detainees, there were threats to their families such as threats to harm children, and threats to sexually abuse or to cut the throat of detainees' mothers.
Tim Weiner is an American reporter and author. He is the author of five books and co-author of a sixth, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.
Detainees held in the United States' Guantanamo Bay detention camps have initiated both individual and widespread hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay, and camp medical authorities have initiated force-feeding programs.
Carol Rosenberg is a senior journalist at The New York Times. Long a military-affairs reporter at the Miami Herald, from January 2002 into 2019 she reported on the operation of the United States' Guantanamo Bay detention camps, at its naval base in Cuba. Her coverage of detention of captives at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp has been praised by her colleagues and legal scholars, and in 2010 she spoke about it by invitation at the National Press Club. Rosenberg had previously covered events in the Middle East. In 2011, she received the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for her nearly decade of work on the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
Jeanne Ruth Vertefeuille was a CIA officer who participated in a small team that investigated and uncovered the actions of Aldrich Ames, a notorious Cold War spy.
In 1995 it was revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency had delivered intelligence reports to the U.S. government between 1986 and 1994 which were based on agent reporting from confirmed or suspected Soviet operatives. From 1985 to his arrest in February 1994, CIA officer and KGB mole Aldrich Ames compromised Agency sources and operations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, leading to the arrest of many CIA agents and the execution of at least ten of them. This allowed the KGB to replace the CIA agents with its own operatives or to force them to cooperate, and the double agents then funneled a mixture of disinformation and true material to U.S. intelligence. Although the CIA's Soviet-East European (SE) and Central Eurasian divisions knew or suspected the sources to be Soviet double agents, they nevertheless disseminated this "feed" material within the government. Some of these intelligence reports even reached Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, as well as President-elect Bill Clinton.
