 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. 20 years of Quantanamo Bay. The detention center at the US Naval Base in Cuba opened in January 2002. At its peak, it housed around 780 people, most of whom were imprisoned without trial. In these 20 years of operations, only 12 detainees have been charged and just two convicted of any crimes by the US military. Between 2002 and 2021, nine detainees died in custody, two of them died from natural causes and seven reportedly committed suicide. The prison remains open despite several calls by the UN and human rights experts around the world to close Quantanamo. UN experts said in a statement on the 20th anniversary of the opening of Quantanamo Bay that two decades of practicing arbitrary detention without trial accompanied by torture or ill treatment is simply unacceptable for any government, particularly a government which has a stated claim to protecting human rights. 39 detainees continue to be held at Quantanamo. 13 of them have been cleared for release but remain jailed. The trial of the five that were charged with helping plot 9-11 is yet to begin. In April 2011, Pikiliks released a cache of classified documents called KITMO files. These files reveal details about this Defense Department operation, which had been shrouded in secrecy for the nine years before that. The files show that the US believed many of those held at the offshore prison to be innocent on only low-level operatives. The files described Quantanamo's system of military detention to be based on torture and coerced testimony. There was no significant screening process to decide which prisoners will be transferred to Quantanamo Bay. Every prisoner who ended up in US custody was sent there even though the majority were not seized by US forces but by US allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan at a time when substantial bounty payments were being offered for Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects. Parvez Mushara, former Pakistani president, admitted to handing over 369 terror suspects to the US for bounty payments totaling millions of dollars. The KITMO files also include the section on 22 children that were detained at Quantanamo after it opened. 20 years after it opened, the calls to shut down Quantanamo are only growing louder. The UN experts further stated, Quantanamo Bay is a site of unparalleled notoriety 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.