Return to Guantánamo

Serial dusts off American terror's old machinery.

- NICHOLAS QUAH

On the surface, Guantánamo Bay may seem like an unlikely target for Sarah Koenig, Julie Snyder, and the Serial team, still principally remembered for spectacle generated from the first season’s real-time true-crime reporting on the case of Adnan Syed. But as Koenig notes in the introduction of season four, this is a story they have been trying to pull together for almost as long as the podcast has been around. “Even as Guantánamo faded as a topic of national discussion, we kept thinking about it,” she narrates. “We even tried writing a TV show about it, a fictionalized version of Guantánamo.” The latest season, then, is an effort coming full circle.

If there’s a clearer symbol for America’s “War on Terror” boondoggle, it’s hard to think of one. Since Guantánamo opened for extrajudicial business in 2002, almost 800 individuals have been held in what functions as the U.S. government’s prison for suspected terrorists—all Muslim, most from the Middle East—but vanishingly few matter in the U.S.’s counterterrorism campaign. Despite flimsy promises from Presidents Bush, Obama, and Biden to shut the place down, the lights are still on. The camp, with its dozens of remaining detainees, continues limping along, a piece of machinery left to gather dust in the country’s basement. The U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan, but the forever war persists.