[1][2][3] These were among the many men known as ghost detainees, as they were ultimately held for years for interrogation by the CIA in its secret prisons known as black sites at various places in Europe, the Mideast, and Asia, including Afghanistan.
Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman reported on August 7, 2010, for the Associated Press that the "high value detainees" Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Nashiri, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, had first been transferred to military custody at Guantanamo on September 24, 2003.
At the time, the CIA thought the men could be held securely and secretly at Guantanamo, without any prospect of the public learning that they had been subjected to what United States courts have determined is torture, including waterboarding, one of the euphemistically termed enhanced interrogation techniques.
[1] Apuuzo and Goldman report the Bush government returned the men to CIA custody three months before the Supreme Court's ruling, to avoid the possibility of having to release any information about them.
[4] In continuing challenges to the secrecy imposed by the Bush administration, in January 2006, US District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff ruled that the United States Department of Defense had to publish a list of all the detainees who had been held in Guantanamo by March 3, 2006.
[6][7] This base, called Penny Lane, was used to hold captives who were under consideration for being recruited as double agents, who would surreptitiously penetrate, and inform on, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other groups suspected of being allied with them.