![]() His mother dated a string of alcoholics and addicts, and took the children to an evangelical church on Sundays Pat Robertson’s sermons blasted from the living-room TV. ![]() His father died in a plane crash when he was three years old, and his mother brought him and his brothers up in Molalla, Oregon, a lumber town about an hour south of Portland. When Wood tried to search for 760 in Guantánamo’s detainee database, he found nothing. ![]() The man confined there was referred to by his detainee number, 760. The International Committee of the Red Cross-which has access to many of the world’s most notorious detention sites, some of them in countries where there is no rule of law-had recently sent representatives to Guantánamo, but the base commander, citing “military necessity,” had refused to allow them into Echo Special. Then a sergeant major pulled him aside for a brief interview, and assigned him to work the night shift in Echo Special, a secret, single-occupancy unit that had been built to house the United States military’s highest-value detainee. For two weeks, he worked as a guard in the cellblocks, monitoring men who had been captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan. “I just remember being super excited, because I thought, I’m going to be doing something important,” Wood told me. ![]() He and his comrades were told that many of the detainees were responsible for 9/11 and, given the opportunity, would strike again. In 2004, Steve Wood was deployed to Guantánamo Bay, as a member of the Oregon National Guard.
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