'Serial' Reveals Surprising Details Inside Guantanamo Bay

The Serial podcast is marking its 10th anniversary by giving listeners a unique insight into life in Guantanamo Bay.

Co-hosts Sarah Koenig and Dana Chivvis have worked for almost a decade to report the untold stories of the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, often referred to as Gitmo.

The duo interviewed more than 100 people—including guards, interrogators, commanders, lawyers, chaplains, translators and former prisoners—to find out more about the "improvised justice system" and said they encountered a "collection of oddities" during their five visits to the prison, including gift shops and various recreational facilities for staff.

"We are very interested in stories about the criminal justice system. All of our stories have been connected to that," Koenig told Newsweek. She added, "Once you start looking at it [Guantanamo] as a criminal justice system, it is bonkers."

Season four of The New York Times podcast, which debuted on March 28, is set to run until May 16.

The prison opened in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, as part of the U.S. government's "War on Terror." It jailed suspected "enemy combatants," many of whom were kept there for years without a trial.

Guantanamo quickly became a notorious institution. Its interrogation techniques pushed the boundaries of international law, and the United Nations condemned it as a "horrific detention and prison complex."

The organization also said the prison was "defined by the systematic use of torture, and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment against hundreds of men brought to the site and deprived of their most fundamental rights."

The hosts said they first visited the prison in 2015, and as soon as they stepped off the escorted press bus, they encountered one of the island's three gift shops, which sold memorabilia such as Disney T-shirts emblazoned with "Guantanamo" and other shirts with the slogan "It don't Git-mo better than this."

"What kept drawing us back to Guantanamo were the surprising little anecdotes where you would think, That couldn't have possibly happened at a United States naval base," Chivvis said, adding, "and yet it did. So it's like that sort of collection of oddities in an editorial sense that did draw us back in."

Koenig added, "The thing that surprised us was how much the stress of working at Guantanamo was, how much more stressful and damaging people found it to themselves personally than even being in active combat zones."

Though the hosts couldn't attest to the specific cause of the psychological damage to each person they spoke with, Koenig said some interviewees suffered from witnessing the confinement of prisoners and realizing that many "were not necessarily who we thought they were and maybe shouldn't have been locked up at all."

"But the overriding thing was more the stress of the command that they were being asked to perform as a 'zero mistakes mission' because of the political pressure on Guantanamo," she added.

The reporters were also surprised by the amount of sex said to be happening between workers on the island. In the season's first episode, one man described the situation as "so much drinking [and] everyone was getting laid." Another woman added, "It was like college, but instead of classes the next day, it was Gitmo."

On the podcast, Paul Rester, the director of the Joint Intelligence Group at Guantanamo, described the prison as "chaos, simply put it was chaotic. Well-meaning chaos, but chaos nonetheless."

Koenig recounted her initial reaction to some of the more surprising elements on the island.

"Wait, there's a bar, and there are concerts, and people are remaking cars and having car shows, and there's a bowling alley?" Koenig said of the facilities for staff and military personnel.

"Those are sometimes the places that you're drawn to, and then you go find stories inside those places," she added.

Serial became a hit in 2014 when its first season investigated the homicide conviction of Adnan Syed over the 1999 death of Hae Min Lee, his former girlfriend. Syed served 23 years of a life sentence before having the charges overturned, thanks in large part to the attention the podcast brought to his case.

The hosts said they had long been fascinated with the stories behind Guantanamo but struggled for years to get people to share their experience on the record. At one point, they thought about making a fictionalized television show about what they had learned, but after years of trying, people eventually began to open up to them.

While the reporters acknowledged they were "standing on the shoulders of a ton" of journalists who did "wonderful work on Guantanamo," they were confident Serial would offer a fresh perspective on the prison, with many interviewees sharing their stories for the first time.

"Some people really opened up to us in ways they just had not done before," Koenig said. She added, "I feel like a lot of our interviews are intimate in a way that I hadn't heard before."

Serial is streaming wherever podcasts are available and on the NYT Audio app.