After failing to deliver on a campaign promise (never mind that day-one executive order) to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, President Obama recently told Congress he intends to transfer some 18 of the 59 inmates left in the facility on his very last day.

Per the Times, they are headed to Italy, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

In the order they appear, a list of quotes from Vanity Fair's 2012 oral history of Guantánamo:

We were flowing people in like the Reserves and the Guard who had about as much business being there as a tit on a boar hog. Everybody went overseas, Guard, Reserve; people who yesterday were baking bread in Pawtucket are now questioning people in Afghanistan. And we wonder why some untoward things occurred? These people were licking their wounds over 9/11, not trained to the tasks that they were going to participate in, not linguistically qualified, not culturally sensitive.
—Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, on the months immediately after 9/11

You still have coercive tactics in the hands of young soldiers, airmen, sailors, who have been put in the interrogation mode after maybe six weeks of training at Fort Huachuca. Without the proper oversight there could be a lot of drift based on their emotionality, their maturity. And that’s what you began to get—you know, everything from what we saw in Abu Ghraib to some of the stories about women sitting on the detainees’ laps, underwear on their head, bras on their head, that sort of thing.
—Michael Gelles, a psychologist at the facility

For me to be taken out of my cell for 15 minutes twice a week, I had to have two soldiers who would shackle me before I was taken out of the cell, and then before I’d walk out of the room, there has to be an infantry patrol with Humvees and fixed machine guns on top and then foot soldiers and then what they call the military working dogs—M.W.D.—and their handler. I needed to be put inside this cage to walk around for 15 minutes in flip-flops. It was amazing. I actually felt extremely dangerous. And it’s funny, because I’m only 5’3,” and all these soldiers are like twice the size of me, lengthwise. They’re doing this for little old me. I wonder what they’d be doing for serious criminals.
—Moazzam Begg, a former detainee

That first big tranche of prisoners was basically not captured by U.S. personnel. It was the Northern Alliance, the warlords associated therewith, and the Paks and others who gave us that first huge tranche, based on bonuses we paid them or based on their own sweep down from the border into Kabul. So in most cases we’ve initially accepted someone else’s word for their guilt.
—Wilkerson

I remember one of the soldiers saying to me, You know, if I wasn’t a terrorist before I came to this place, I would be by the time I leave it. That’s a guard who said that to me.
—Begg

You know, it was not very long into my tour as chief that I began to hear Rich [Armitage, former deputy secretary of state] use terms like “the Gestapo,” “the Nazis,” to describe the vice president’s office.
—Wilkerson

Guantánamo has changed. It is not that prison anymore. And when the administration—the Bush administration or the Obama administration—describe it as a very different facility, in significant respects they’re right. Some of the units are very bad, but some of the units are not. Some of the units are medium-security units. And while severe, they’re not terrible compared to prisons all over the country. Guantánamo’s moral bankruptcy now is not that it’s built around the creation of debilitating despair. Its moral bankruptcy now is that these guys are held without ever having been charged or tried or convicted of anything.
—Joseph Margulies, the attorney for Yaser Esam Hamdi, who won a case against the Pentagon in the Supreme Court requiring the government to give Guantánamo detainees due process.

The abuse at Guantánamo extended far beyond the physical. A recent Times investigation into the mental health care that inmates received at the facility found that the integrity of health care professionals was tainted by a "willful blindness to the consequences" when they were forced to work alongside interrogators and kept in the dark regarding the true "special interrogation techniques" used on the men.