Despite his initial insistence to the contrary, it’s become quite clear that President Barack Obama has no intention of fulfilling Candidate Barack Obama’s promise of shutting down Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Currently, there are still 172 prisoners locked up there.
The New York Times and several other news organizations got their hands on a dossier of secret files related to the 779 detainees who have been sent to the prison since 2002. The documents were compiled between February 2002 and January 2009.
The new Wikileaks documents are largely silent on the infamous interrogation techniques used at the facility, instead focusing more on the “high risk” detainees themselves — evaluated personal histories, the relationship between the captors and captives, inmate infractions.
But mostly they “provide a deeper look at the frightening, if flawed, intelligence that has persuaded the Obama administration, too, that the prison cannot readily be closed.”
The dossier is the fourth major release of secret files in the past year, joining leaks on the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and some 250,000 diplomatic cables. This one reveals an inside, yet incomplete, look into a prison that seems “frozen in time,” since no new inmates have arrived there since 2007.
The Guantánamo assessments seem unlikely to end the long-running debate about America’s most controversial prison. The documents can be mined for evidence supporting beliefs across the political spectrum about the relative perils posed by the detainees and whether the government’s system of holding most without trials is justified.
Much of the information in the documents is impossible to verify. The documents were prepared by intelligence and military officials operating at first in the haze of war, then, as the years passed, in a prison under international criticism. In some cases, judges have rejected the government’s allegations, because confessions were made during coercive interrogation or other sources were not credible.
The Wikileaks site shows more raw data like this:
Abu Zubaydah (ISN 10016), the supposed “high-value detainee” seized in Pakistan in March 2002, who spent four and a half years in secret CIA prisons, including facilities in Thailand and Poland. Subjected to waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning, on 83 occasions in CIA custody August 2002, Abu Zubaydah was moved to Guantánamo with 13 other “high-value detainees” in September 2006.Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (ISN 212), the emir of a military training camp for which Abu Zubaydah was the gatekeeper, who, despite having his camp closed by the Taliban in 2000, because he refused to allow it to be taken over by al-Qaeda, is described in these documents as Osama bin Laden’s military commander in Tora Bora. Soon after his capture in December 2001, al-Libi was rendered by the CIA to Egypt, where, under torture, he falsely confessed that al-Qaeda operatives had been meeting with Saddam Hussein to discuss obtaining chemical and biological weapons. Al-Libi recanted this particular lie, but it was nevertheless used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Al-Libi was never sent to Guantánamo, although at some point, probably in 2006, the CIA sent him back to Libya, where he was imprisoned, and where he died, allegedly by committing suicide, in May 2009.
Sharqawi Abdu Ali al-Hajj (ISN 1457), a Yemeni, also known as Riyadh the Facilitator, who was seized in a house raid in Pakistan in February 2002, and is described as “an al-Qaeda facilitator.” After his capture, he was transferred to a torture prison in Jordan run on behalf of the CIA, where he was held for nearly two years, and was then held for six months in US facilities in Afghanistan. He was flown to Guantánamo in September 2004.
That’s just a small sample. It might be worth it to jump over there and read it for yourself.
Politico broke down the release in this handy, bulleted fashion:
- Most of the prisoners remaining are rated as having a “high risk” to the United States if released hastily.- About one-third of those detainees moved to other countries or freed were also rated as “high risk.”
- Around March 2002, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “ordered a former Baltimore resident to don a suicide bomb vest and carry out a ‘martyrdom’ attack” against Pervez Musharraf, who was Pakistan’s president.
- For years, innocent men were incarcerated because of mistaken identity.
- China, Russia, Tajikistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Algeria and Tunisia have sent intelligence officers to question the detainees.
- Dozens of Yemenis still at Gitmo traveled to Afghanistan for “basic military training,” and not as global terrorists.
- One detainee was recruited by British and Canadian intelligence to work as an agent, but he “never shifted his militant loyalties.”
- Some of the first freed “did not receive a formal hearing”; among them was a Pakistani who became a suicide attacker years later.
Even though the information doesn’t seem to drop a bombshell on Guatanamo Bay — the kind of gotcha files that would renew calls for closing the facility — the files do provide “an extraordinary look inside a prison that has long been known for its secrecy.”
The Obama Administration condemned the publication of the secret documents, which were obtained by WikiLeaks last year and provided to the newspaper by another source. They claim, “an administration task force set up in January 2009 reviewed the information in the prisoner assessments” and not surprisingly “came to different conclusions.”
In the end, however, knowledge is power. The American voting public needs as much information as possible to make informed voting decisions. So, even though there are no bombshells revealed, every nugget of “secret” information revealed means having a bigger picture to evaluate the actions of our elected officials.
(Photo by Todd Heisler/New York Times)
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