By Chris Anders, Senior Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office

On January 11, 2002, the first prisoners were slammed into hastily assembled cages at the Guantánamo Navy base, and men then streamed in from across the globe. Typically brought into custody without even the most basic due process review, the newly arrived detainees included large numbers who had no reason to be in any prison, much less Guantánamo. Yet they were all now caught in a prison that one Bush official called "the legal equivalent of outer space" – a place where no laws were intended to apply.

Wow. Twelve years. The time has flown by. Seems like just yesterday that the Justice Department sent over its torture memos to then-CIA General Counsel John Rizzo, ramping up a CIA torture program that horribly abused more than a hundred men, killing a few of them. No one at the CIA was ever even charged with a crime. Some agents, in fact, got job promotions.