Nowhere Land: America and Its Enemies at Guantánamo
The project:
Nowhere Land is a groundbreaking narrative history of the United States detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Based on hundreds of interviews and previously secret documents, the book shows in intimate, new detail how the military’s experiment in the strategic interrogation of terror suspects ensnared captives and captors alike, and gave way to one of the most costly US intelligence failures of the last century.
From Nowhere Land:
The cellblocks were crude, slapdash and—even at a cost of $30 million—not well made. Pentagon officials who tried to decipher the cryptic instructions of their boss thought Rumsfeld wanted something he wouldn’t mind abandoning after a few years, once the prisoners had all been wrung out, prosecuted or sent home.
The grant jury: Urgent, revelatory, brave investigative reporting from someone with unmatched sources in his subject area. Nowhere Land is a forensic, nuanced and devastating account of a hidden chapter in American history, one whose consequences still reverberate around the world. Like the best narrative non-fiction it reads like a novel, in this case a thriller with appalling, hard-to-credit twists and turns. We will look back at this period of history, when people could disappear into a system without trial, justice or end, and wonder how it happened and who made it possible. Golden has devoted himself to pinning down a story that many would prefer never be told, and has sacrificed much to write what must be written. A monumental achievement.
Timothy Golden’s journalism honors include two shared Pulitzer Prizes for International Reporting and National Reporting. Previously a senior writer at The New York Times, in 2014 he was a founding managing editor of The Marshall Project. His reporting has also been recognized by the Overseas Press Club, the Inter-American Press Association and the Taylor Award for Fairness in Newspapers, among others. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, and was awarded a MacArthur Residency at Yaddo. He is a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He lives in New York.