America's Trial

The behind-the-scenes look at the biggest—and perhaps the strangest—case in US history: the prosecution of the five detainees accused of planning 9/11.

Told with exceptional and colorful detail, America’s Trial is the only comprehensive account of the effort to prosecute the five Guantanamo Bay detainees accused of planning the worst crime in US history—the September 11th 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 the past ten years.

In telling this story over fifty-five reporting trips, award-winning journalist John Ryan takes 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 historic 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 serves as a necessary bookend to events that have defined much of the war on terror.