"It's the legal equivalent of outer space," one official remarked.

A young Justice Department attorney named John Yoo agreed. He wrote a legal memo for the Pentagon's top attorney on December 28, 2001 and explained that while the lease agreement gave the US "complete jurisdiction and control" of Guantanamo, it was still outside American sovereignty due to its location in Cuba. In other words, neither US nor Cuban courts would have jurisdiction over detainees held there if they tried to challenge the legality of their detention.

The day before Yoo finished writing the legal memo, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld explained to reporters why the Bush administration had settled on detaining "war on terror" captives at Guantanamo. "I would characterize Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as the least worst place we could have selected. It has disadvantages.... Its disadvantages, however, seem to be modest relative to the alternatives."

The public was told by Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials that Guantanamo was needed because the men who were sent there were the "worst of the worst," the "sort of people who would chew through a hydraulics cable to bring a C-17 [transport plane] down."