Tom Junod: On December 7, 2006, a new jail opened in Guantánamo. It was, and is, called Camp 6. Guantánamo is located at the arid eastern end of Cuba, plagued with iguanas and surrounded by the endless indigo desert of the Caribbean. The detention center there, opened in 2002, had always been a provisional thing, defined by its infinities of razor wire and its guard-towered skyline. Camp 6 was different. Built by the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root to duplicate a jail in southeastern Michigan, it was made of concrete as gray as wastewater, and its facade was not only windowless but featureless, a dungeon for an era of diminished expectations. Camp 6 was built for permanence, and by the time the first detainees walked through its iron doors, it was a maximum-security memorial to American prerogative. The detainees who were held in Camp 6 were the ones whose fates were both open-ended and predetermined, the ones who would not be charged, not be tried, and, most important, not be freed. They would stay, extrajudicial guests, until the cessation of hostilities in a war with no end, or until America elected a president who decided that a policy of preventive detention presented a risk to his country greater than the risk of dangerous men going free.
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