The prison was established under the presidency of George W. Bush, in 2002 during the War on Terror. The Secretary of Defense at the time was Donald Rumsfeld, who said that the prison was built to hold dangerous people, question them, and charge them with war crimes: "These men are particularly dangerous... at least one detainee now in Cuba has been threatening to kill Americans. Another has bitten a guard... To stop future terrorist attacks, we have detained these people, and we have and will be questioning them to gather additional intelligence information...The reality is that they have been charged with something. They have been found to be engaging on the behalf of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban and have been captured." 