America’s Trial

The shocking behind-the-scenes look at the biggest courtroom case in US history: the five Guantanamo Baydetainees accused of planning 9/11.

America's Trial documents in exceptional detail the forgotten era of Guantanamo Bay-the effort to prosecute the five detainees accused of planning the worst crime in US history, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. While ignored by most media outlets, the result has been a riveting courtroom drama to determine if a democracy has the legal and moral authority to prosecute the men it previously tortured. Our government, so willing to break from norms and its own values with the CIA rendition program, has spent a maddening amount of time trying to fit the victims of illegal interrogations into a court of law. America's Trial captures these events from the vantage point of one of only two journalists in the world to live part-time on the base over nearly fifty reporting trips.

In telling this story, award-winning journalist John Ryantakes readers into an ecosystem that so few get to see, capturing the unique life experience of having one of the most notorious places on earth as a second home. The doomed legal effort is inseparable from the surreal context and the absurdities of hosting the biggest case in US history in what is effectively a small Caribbean beach town. America's Trial, the only comprehensive account of the case, serves as a necessary bookend to events that have defined much of the war on terror.