Camp X-Ray, where the first detainees at Guantánamo were imprisoned and interrogated, is today an abandoned site. The guard towers are empty, the weeds waist high. Banana-rat droppings litter the rotting floors. Newer prisons miles away hold the detainees who remain. And “remain” is the operative word. Although Barack Obama vowed to shut the facility down, the administration’s attempts to do so have been blocked by Congress, which refuses to authorize funds to transfer detainees to prisons on the U.S. mainland.

It has been an ugly, damaging experiment. The whole point of Guantánamo was to create a regime of incarceration and interrogation—including torture—that the law could not reach: a “legal black hole,” as the English court of appeal put it. Although the 45-square-mile naval base on the southern shore of Cuba is fully subject to U.S. writ—federal environmental laws even extend to iguanas, and killing one can bring a heavy fine—the Bush administration argued from the outset that Guantánamo was outside American legal jurisdiction, and that, in essence, its personnel could treat detainees as they wished. And they did, making the name “Guantánamo” a rallying cry throughout the Islamic world. Slowly and painstakingly, lawyers and the courts, with help from sympathetic members of the military, have reasserted something resembling the rule of law.

January 11, 2012, marks the 10th anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees. Guantánamo is still in operation. Some of those in custody will have their fates decided by military tribunals. Others face indefinite detention. Taking note of the anniversary, Vanity Fair set out to compile an oral history of Guantánamo.

September 12, 2001: In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the administration begins to draw up contingency plans for prisoners captured in what is soon to become the War on Terror. Pierre-Richard Prosper, the U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes (2001–5), becomes the initial point man.

Pierre-Richard Prosper: I had a conversation with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and we began to look at the question of what are we going to do with al-Qaeda and Taliban once they are captured. We projected that maybe we would pick up several hundred. A week or so later we had a meeting at the White House with Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, John Bellinger, and Jim Haynes, to name a few, and we began to look at this question.

November 13, 2001: President Bush signs an executive order authorizing the secretary of defense to hold non-U.S. citizens in indefinite detention. The city of Mazar-e-Sharif, in Afghanistan, had fallen days earlier. The number of prisoners is accumulating rapidly, and the military is unprepared to evaluate and process them. The search for a place to hold the prisoners accelerates; many sites (including Tinian, the Pacific island from which the Enola Gay took off to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima) are ruled out. Lawrence Wilkerson served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell in the Bush administration’s first term. William Howard Taft IV was Powell’s legal adviser.

Lawrence Wilkerson: We were flowing people in like the Reserves and the Guard who had about as much business being there as a tit on a boar hog. Everybody went overseas, Guard, Reserve; people who yesterday were baking bread in Pawtucket are now questioning people in Afghanistan. And we wonder why some untoward things occurred? These people were licking their wounds over 9/11, not trained to the tasks that they were going to participate in, not linguistically qualified, not culturally sensitive.

Pierre-Richard Prosper: On Thanksgiving weekend, I received a phone call informing me that we had just captured approximately 300 al-Qaeda and Taliban. I asked all our assistant secretaries and regional bureaus to canvass literally the world to begin to look at what options we had as to where a detention facility could be established. We began to eliminate places for different reasons. One day, in one of our meetings, we sat there puzzled as places continued to be eliminated. An individual from the Department of Justice effectively blurted out, What about Guantánamo? The individual then began to make clear that Guantánamo now is an empty facility, that there’s a basic structure there, that it’s a place that had been used to hold Haitian and Cuban migrants, and that U.S. courts in the past have given the executive branch great deference in what it did in Guantánamo.