This morning the Guardian and others have published a cache of files on Guantánamo Bay detainees, which lift the lid on life inside the controversial prison camp in Cuba.
The Guantánamo files reveal...
• An 89-year-old Afghan villager was detained at Guantánamo Bay despite suffering from dementia, depression and sickness, while a 14-year-old boy, who had been an innocent kidnap victim, was also imprisoned. Other files reveal that almost 100 of the inmates who passed through Guantánamo are listed by their captors as having had depressive or psychotic illness.
• A number of British nationals and residents were held for years despite US authorities being aware they were not Taliban or al-Qaida members. One Briton, Jamal al-Harith was rendered to Guantánamo simply because he had been held in a Taliban prison and was thought to have knowledge of their interrogation techniques.
• US authorities relied heavily on information obtained from a small number of detainees under torture. They continued to maintain this testimony was reliable even after admitting that the prisoners who provided it had been mistreated.
• US authorities listed the main Pakistani intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), as a terrorist organisation alongside groups like al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iranian intelligence.
The Guantánamo files are among hundreds of thousands of documents US soldier Bradley Manning is accused of having turned over to the Wikileaks website more than a year ago. They were obtained by the New York Times, who shared them with the Guardian, which is publishing extracts today, having redacted information which might identify informants. The New York Times says the files were made available to it not by Wikileaks, but "by another source on the condition of anonymity".
Separately a different collaboration of European and US newspapers received the cache from Wikileaks, and has also published on the Guantánamo files today.
You can browse the files and visit the Guardian's Guantánamo page here.
On this blog we'll follow all the latest reaction to the revelations as it happens, and cover the release of more documents throughout the day.
On Comment is free, the Guardian's Julian Glover writes that "what is given new prominence by these latest Guantánamo files is the cold, incompetent stupidity of the system: a system that tangled up the old and the young, the sick and the innocent. A system in which to say you were not a terrorist might be taken as evidence of your cunning."
"If you could only know what we can know, you would understand that what we are doing is right," our leaders used to assure us. Well now we really do know – we have the documents, we have the transcripts of interviews with former prisoners, we have everything it takes to understand the nasty story of Guantánamo, exposed today in 759 leaked documents containing the words of the people who ran the place. And it is obvious that we should have seen through the evasions from the start.
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The clinical idiocy of this dreadful place is the most chilling thing of all, since it strips away even the cynical but persuasive defence: it was harsh but it worked and it kept the world safe.
It didn't work, much of the time. These files show that some of the information collected was garbage and that many of those held knew nothing that could be of use to the people demanding answers from them. Far from securing the fight against terror, the people running the camp faced an absurdist battle to educate a 14-year-old peasant boy kidnapped by an Afghan tribe and treat the dementia, depression and osteoarthritis of an 89-year-old man caught up in a raid on his son's house.
Other cases are just as pathetic. Jamal al-Harith, born Ronald Fiddler in Manchester in 1966, was imprisoned by the Taliban as a possible spy, after being found wandering through Afghanistan as a Muslim convert. In a movement of Kafkaesque horror the Americans held him in Camp X-Ray simply because he had been a prisoner of its enemy. "He was expected to have knowledge of Taliban treatment of prisoners and interrogation tactics," the files record.
My colleague David Leigh's piece on understanding the Guantánamo files is well worth reading. The cache obtained "consists of 759 'detainee assessment' dossiers written between 2002 and 2009 and sent up through the military hierarchy to the US Southern Command headquarters in Miami," David writes. The files appear to cover all but 20 of the prisoners.
A number of other documents in the cache spell out guidelines for interrogating and deciding the fate of detainees. One, the "JTF-GTMO matrix of threat indicators" details the "indicators" which should be used to "determine a detainee's capabilities and intentions to pose a terrorist threat if the detainee were given the opportunity." Another provides a matrix for deciding whether a prisoner should be held or released.
All the detainee assessments are classified "secret" but sometimes they mention separate, more sensitive "secret compartmented intelligence" (SCI) dossiers held elsewhere.
The most recent prisoner assessments are from January 2009 when Rear-Admiral DM Thomas Jr, who was the Guantánamo commander at the time, protested about the plan to transfer out two Saudis and a Yemeni, all of whom he still regarded as "high risk".
Meanwhile the New York Times, which shared the documents with the Guardian, has published a "A Note to Readers" on how it managed to get hold of the files.
The Guantánamo files were part of a huge trove of secret documents leaked last year to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks. They were made available to The New York Times by another source on the condition of anonymity. National Public Radio and the British newspaper The Guardian are also producing reports based on the documents.
The files include allegations that cannot be independently verified and have in many cases been contested by detainees or their lawyers. As with earlier documents from this cache — the battlefield logs from Afghanistan and Iraq and the secret State Department cables — The Times has redacted or withheld information that would put lives at risk, including the identities of some informants. An exception was made for certain high-profile inmates who have already been publicly identified as sources of information.
My colleague James Ball was one of the Guardian team involved in mining the Guantánamo files. He writes that "briefing documents used to train staff in assessing the threat level of new detainees advise that possession of the [Casio] F-91W – available online for as little as £4 – suggests the wearer has been trained in bomb making by al-Qaida in Afghanistan".
The report states: "The Casio was known to be given to the students at al-Qaida bomb-making training courses in Afghanistan at which the students received instruction in the preparation of timing devices using the watch.
"Approximately one-third of the JTF-GTMO detainees that were captured with these models of watches have known connections to explosives, either having attended explosives training, having association with a facility where IEDs were made or where explosives training was given, or having association with a person identified as an explosives expert."
The story has garnered lots of interest on Twitter this morning, perhaps not least because of the watch's popularity among youngsters. Here's a round up of some of the tweets.
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David Leigh writes that the Telegraph has been catching up on the Guantánamo story this morning and "trying to make its readers' flesh creep with stories of a threatened al-Qaida 'nuclear hellstorm'".
In fact, the leaked prisoner files demonstrate just how thin the evidence has been that al-Qaida has its hands anywhere near any nuclear material. Nor did interrogators ever discover any concrete facts to confirm their post 9/11 panic that al-Qaida possessed anthrax spores.
There is a single unsubstantiated reference in a 2006 Guantanamo report about al-Qaida leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who had been recently waterboarded in a secret CIA prison and revealed "numerous plots and plans". The entry reads: "Detainee told his interrogators that al-Qaida had planned to create a 'nuclear hell storm' in America."
In a 2004 interrogation, he also apparently agreed that al-Qaida was making an "effort to produce anthrax" and that a colleague had told him so.
Below the line, crazyfatguy writes:
It's easy to say that Obama failed to close Guantanamo but the truth was he was never going to be able to do so. Not when the USA political system requires him to compromise with conservative-leaning members of his own Democrat party, let alone the Republicans, to get anything done. There's too many Sentators & Representatives from both parties who are reluctant to admit that George W. Bush did anything wrong with regards to Guantanamo - because that would mean admitting that they themselves were wrong in being complicit to what Bush did.
The Washington Post published an indepth piece analysing Obama's failure to close Guantánamo on Saturday, which it said was "based on interviews with more than 30 current and former administration officials, as well as members of Congress and their staff, members of the George W. Bush administration, and activists".
The WaPo piece breaks down the Obama administration efforts over the last two years in an interesting and nuanced read. The Post identifies one fundamental failure near the top of the article:
The one theme that repeatedly emerged in interviews was a belief that the White House never pressed hard enough on what was supposed to be a signature goal. Although the closure of Guantanamo Bay was announced in an executive order, which Obama signed on Jan. 22, 2009, the fanfare never translated into the kind of political push necessary to sustain the policy.
Below the line lontano points out the French newspaper Le Monde says it received the files directly from Wikileaks, whereas the Guardian does not.
David Leigh, the Guardian's investigations editor, explains:
Unlike previous occasions, today's coverage by the Guardian of its leaked Guantánamo files does not attribute them to Wikileaks. Instead, the paper explains that the massive tranche of secret US material was shared with it by the New York Times, and that the New York Times itself did not get the files from Wikileaks.
Behind these statements lies a history of feuding on the part of Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange. The Gitmo files are the fifth (and very nearly the final) cache of data that disaffected US soldier Bradley Manning is alleged to have turned over to the Wikileaks website more than a year ago.
Last year, the Guardian brokered a pioneering deal with Assange under which some of these packages, notably 250,000 leaked US diplomatic cables, would be published collaboratively across the world. The original partners were the New York Times and other European papers, such as El Pais in Spain.
But Assange objected to some articles the Guardian and the New York Times had written, notably those detailing the Swedish sex allegations over which he is currently fighting extradition. He decided to tear up the original deal. According to those close to him, he conceived a plan instead to distribute the Guantánamo material only to a range of rival papers, including the right-wing Daily Telegraph, the Washington Post and Al Jazeera, whilst preventing readers of the Guardian and the New York Times from having access to it.
The New York Times, however, obtained the file from its own sources. When other papers discovered the Guardian and New York Times joint publishing plans late last night, they hurried out their own versions of the Guantánamo files, in an attempt to catch up.
The leak of Guantánamo files includes an 18-page confidential document given to interrogators at the camp outlining how to spot al-Qaida and Taliban operatives.
The document is marked SECRET NOFORN – the highest level secrecy file obtained by Wikileaks. The designation means it was designed never be shown to non-US citizens.
You can browse the document in full here. It is page 4 which marks the Casio F-91W as suspicious, along with "$100 US bills", "high-tech electronics" and a "satellite phone". Also listed, somewhat ambiguously, is "handwritten pocket litter".
My colleague Jason Burke writes that in the Guantanamo files US authorities describe the main Pakistani intelligence service as a terrorist organisation.
Recommendations to interrogators at Guantánamo Bay rank the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) alongside al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon as threats. Being linked to any of these groups is an indication of terrorist or insurgent activity, the documents say.
Jason writes that the "revelation that the ISI is considered as much of a threat as al-Qaida and the Taliban will cause fury in Pakistan", adding: "It will further damage to the already poor relationship between US intelligence services and their Pakistani counterparts, supposedly key allies in the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other Islamist militants in south Asia."
Relations between America and Pakistan have been tense for years. A series of high-level attempts have been made in recent weeks to improve ties after the American CIA contractor Raymond Davis killed two Pakistanis in January. [...]
The details of the alleged ISI support for insurgents at the very least give an important insight into the thinking of American strategists and senior decision-makers who would have been made aware of the intelligence as it was gathered. Many documents refer to alleged ISI activities in 2002 or 2003, long before the policy shift in 2007 that saw the Bush administration become much more critical of the Pakistani security establishment and distance itself from Pervez Musharraf, who was president.
One example is found among reasons given by Guantánamo officials for the continued detention of Harun Shirzad al-Afghani, a veteran militant who arrived there in June 2007. His file states he is believed to have attended a meeting in August 2006 at which Pakistani military and intelligence officials joined senior figures in the Taliban, al-Qaida, the Lashkar-e-Taiba group responsible for the 2008 attack in Mumbai and the Hezb-e-Islami group led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
The meeting was to discuss operations in Afghanistan against coalition forces, says the memo. It cites an unidentified letter in the possession of US intelligence services describing the meeting which, it says, ended with a decision by the various insurgent factions "to increase terrorist operations in the Kapisa, Kunar, Laghman and Nangarhar provinces [of Afghanistan], including suicide bombings, mines, and assassinations".
Harun Shirzad al-Afghani was reported to have told his interrogators that in 2006 an unidentified Pakistani ISI officer paid 1m Pakistani rupees to a militant to transport ammunition to a depot within Afghanistan jointly run by al-Qaida, the Taliban and Hekmatyar's faction.
The Guardian's all-encompassing Guantánamo files interactive is now online. The interactive database has details on all 779 detainees – "some of them 9/11 masterminds, many of them Afghan farmers".
My colleague James Ball writes that "one troubling element to emerge in today's Guantánamo Files coverage is that Wikileaks seems to have reverted to publishing material without redaction".
Though the organisation hasn't published all 759 documents in one go, those that have been released include information the Guardian and New York Times specifically kept out, including sensitive personal information on detainees and information about informants.
The informant issue is particularly problematic given many detainees have subsequently been released and so could potentially face repercussions if they are believed to have been complicit in US actions – information may have been given under duress, or even torture, but this would not be referenced in these documents.
The Guardian redacted information on informants except in a few very special cases such as where the informant was dead, or already well known in the public domain.
The Guardian is staggering publication of some Guantánamo files throughout the day. One of the latest articles launched to our Guantánamo page reports that almost 100 prisoners in the camp were classified by the US army as having psychiatric illnesses including severe depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
James Ball writes that "reports chronicle the disturbed behaviour of inmates, sometimes so extreme that even US intelligence officers acknowledged they were unsuitable for interrogation".
Afghan prisoner 356, Modullah Abdul Raziq, who had been "captured by anti-Taliban forces", was found unfit for interview in February 2002 when the first wave of Guantánamo inmates were psychiatrically assessed.
Raziq, the file notes, was regularly disruptive. His behaviour included ripping off his uniform, drinking shampoo, daubing his cell and himself with excrement and spitting at guards. Psychiatrists concluded he had a disorder "psychotic in nature, likely schizophrenia" and called for his removal from the base.
Camp staff noted Raziq had no proven affiliation with al-Qaida and stressed that transferring him "will remove a significant personnel burden and security risk from Camp X-ray, that provides no intelligence value to US forces, and an individual more than likely incapable of standing trial".
The report goes on: "Repatriating detainee 356 to Afghanistan causes minimal to no risk to US forces still operating in that region, as Afghan authorities would more than likely confine the detainee upon his arrival."
Raziq was released from Guantánamo into Afghan custody within a month of the assessment.
Declan Walsh, the Guardian's Pakistan correspondent, emails to say there has been a "stunningly muted reaction to the Gitmo files" in the country – "including to the news that the US military views the military's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate as a 'terrorist entity' alongside al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah".
I'm not surprised. The media here is generally timid about stories criticizing the ISI or detail its purported links to militant groups; flicking through the news channels at the top of the last hour, the top stories focused on army denials of secret peace talks with India, a Supreme Court decision to issue identity cards to transgender men, and ongoing power rationing. Nothing I could see on Gitmo.
Of course the story is very fresh, so local media may be just catching up. And I don't expect the silence to last. Relations between the US and the CIA are scraping rock bottom these days following a succession of damaging episodes – the 'outing' of the local CIA station chief last December; the spectacular Raymond Davis debacle in February, and now a fresh furore over CIA drone strikes in the tribal belt.
Over the past six weeks the country's most senior officials, from the army chief to the prime minister, have issued a welter of anti-drone statements; there's been just two drone strikes. So once the media finds its feet, or perhaps if the military or ISI issue a statement, we can expect the Gitmo files to re-ignite the spy fraternity's biggest war of words.
The Huffington Post has an interesting explainer on the backstory to today's Guantánamo revelations.
A few weeks ago, the Times informed NPR investigative unit head Susanne Reber and reporter Margot Williams - who joined NPR last year after having previously maintained the Times' Guantanamo Bay database - to give them the news: the paper had obtained the GITMO files.
The Times also provided the documents to The Guardian -- a reversal of the papers' relationship around the State Department cables, whereby the British paper supplied WikiLeaks documents to The Times. Assange was at odds with the Times; now he's cut ties to The Guardian, too.
Meyer says he doesn't know who provided them to the Times. For now, all that's known is who didn't.
"WikiLeaks is not our source," Times executive editor Bill Keller told The Huffington Post. "We got the material with no embargo."
While these three organisations were working on the documents, another group – which included the Telegraph, the Washington Post, McClatchy newspapers and previous Wikileaks publishers Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel – also had the files, but were working to a a fixed publication time, HuffPo says.
NPR and the Times had planned on posting stories Sunday night, but ended up publishing a bit earlier than expected after The Telegraph jumped out of the gate with its piece just after 8 p.m. EST. (Here are the first pieces from The Telegraph, the Times, and NPR).McClatchy's [chief of correspondents, Mark] Seibel, said the WikiLeaks notified him at 5:30 p.m. EST that the embargo was lifted. So McClatchy - and the other news organizations working on the project - needed to scramble to finish their first stories as The Times and NPR put the finishing touches on theirs.
Incidentally, here is the New York Times and NPR interactive feature on what the two US news orgs are calling The Guantánamo Docket. Pressing play shows how the number of detainees held in Cuba swelled to over 680 in the middle of 2003 before gradually decreasing since.
Separately this NYT bar chart shows where the detainees who have left Guantanamo have been transferred to. The chart shows no prisoners have been transferred to China – despite the leaked documents showing 20 Uighurs were captured at a Taliban Tora Bora camp in 2002.
David Leigh and James Ball wrote in the Guardian that the US will not forcibly return them to China, and has struggled to offload them elsewhere due to China's protestations. Five were eventually unloaded to Albania, while others went to Switzerland and Bermuda, but five remain in Guantánamo, according to David and James:
Four footsoldiers who have not been classed as a threat since 2005 and their alleged leader, Ahmed Mohammed Yaqub, who has been downgraded from his 2008 high-risk assessment.
The five refuse to go to the only two tiny island havens on offer, Palau and the Maldives, where they say they have no cultural ties. On 18 April the US supreme court threw out their bid to be allowed into the US instead.
More disclosures from the Guantanamo files: "One of the biggest and most explosive clashes at Guantánamo Bay has been fought not between guards and prisoners but between US interrogators," according to my colleague Ewen MacAskill.
Ewen writes that "in theory there was – and still is – a simple command structure at Guantánamo, run by the commander of the Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTF GTMO in military jargon)".
Despite this, in reality there were lots of agencies at the naval base in Cuba, sometimes working together but more often at odds and at times barely speaking to one another.
On the ground alongside the JTF GTMO interrogators were the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF), an elite unit, many of whose members had a law enforcement background and opposed the use of harsh methods.
Also in the mix was the CIA, which George Bush made the lead agency in spite of its failure to stop 9/11. Jostling for a piece of the action were the FBI and the Behavioural Science Consultation Team, a group of psychiatrists and psychologists set up by the defence department.
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Evidence of the in-fighting among the agencies can be found towards the end of the detainee reports, in which the camp commander assesses the risk posed by a prisoner and his intelligence value. The commander makes a recommendation whether to release, keep in detention or send to another government for imprisonment.
The final paragraph deals with "co-ordination" between the agencies and it is here that the friction surfaces. The commander often reports that CITF "defers" to JTF GTMO. "Defers" sounds dull and bureaucratic but it is a loaded word in the context of Guantánamo, reflecting a profound difference in interrogation techniques and conclusions.
Typical is a report on Saleh Abdall al-Oshan, a Saudi who was among the first to arrive at Guantanamo, in 21 January 2002. The JTF GTMO assessment, written in 2004, was that "this detainee is a member of al-Qaida and/or its global terrorist network". But the commander added: "CITF assessed the detainee as a low risk on 22 March 2004. In the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between the CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders, CITF will defer to JTF GTMO's assessment that the detainee poses a medium to high risk."
Time and time again CITF is at odds with JTF GTMO but forced to defer.
David Leigh writes that the Guantánamo files reveal that the US military insists its use of torture has extracted accurate information from al-Qaida prisoners.
This is despite the fact two "enemy combatants" who were the first victims of the policy of deliberate ill-treatment cannot be prosecuted because of the illegal way they were interrogated almost a decade ago. Saudi inmate Maad al-Qahtani and Mauritanian Mohammed Ould Salahi are among the 172 prisoners languishing indefinitely at the internment camp in Cuba despite Barack Obama's attempts to close it down. Qahtani has been there for over nine years.
The US military still claims Qahtani to be a would-be "20th hijacker" who narrowly failed to get into the US in time for 9/11, when teams of terrorists seized control of planes and flew them into the World Trade Centre and Pentagon. The prisoner assessment file claims: "Although publicly released records allege detainee was subject to harsh interrogation techniques in the early stages of detention, detainee's admission of involvement in [Osama bin Laden's] special mission to the US appear to be true and are corroborated in reporting from other sources."
The file adds: "He has admitted using a cover story and continues to withhold information of intelligence value."
The records make similar claims about Salahi, claimed to be head of an al-Qaida cell in Germany and recruiter of three of the 9/11 hijackers. He was arrested at his home in Mauritania, rendered to Jordan for eight months, passed on to the US interrogation unit at Bagram in Afghanistan and finally shipped on to Guantánamo in July 2002. He was subjected to the same range of deliberate maltreatment at Guantánamo detailed in 2005 by a military investigation, the Schmidt-Furlow report.
Once again the Guantánamo authorities refused to accept that information obtained through torture is unreliable. Salahi's classified assessment file, dated 3 March 2008, says: "Analyst note: Detainee is determined to be highly credible, notwithstanding … the Schmidt-Furlough [sic] report ... Given the extensive reporting provided by detainee, he remains one of the most valuable sources in detention at JTF-GTMO. He has been highly co-operative and continues to provide valuable intelligence."
At US news site Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald has been analysing what we can learn from the Guantánamo Bay files.
"The documents reveal vast new information about these detainees and, in particular, the shoddy and unreliable nature of the "evidence" used (both before and now) to justify their due-process-free detentions," Greenwald says.
One of the points he picks out from the coverage of the leaked documents is that:
Once again we find how much we now rely on whistleblowers in general – and WikiLeaks and (if he did what's accused) Bradley Manning in particular – to learn the truth and see the evidence about what the world's most powerful factions are actually doing. WikiLeaks is responsible for more newsworthy scoops over the last year than all media outlets combined: it's not even a close call. And if Bradley Manning is the leaker, he has done more than any other human being in our lifetime to bring about transparency and shine a light on what military and government power is doing.
Greenwald adds that "perhaps most important of all, these documents conclusively underscore the evils of the Obama administration's indefinite detention regime".
Just last month, President Obama signed an Executive Order directing that dozens of detainees held for years at Guantanamo continue to be imprisoned indefinitely without any charges: either in a real court or even before a military commission. Although indefinite detention was one of the primary hallmarks of Bush/Cheney radicalism, this order was justified by the White House and its followers on the ground that the President knows of secret evidence that shows that these detainees are Too Dangerous to Release, yet cannot be prosecuted because the evidence against them is tainted (see this post for why that line of reasoning is so logically and morally twisted).
The idea of trusting the government to imprison people for life based on secret, untested evidence never reviewed by a court should repel any decent or minimally rational person, but these newly released files demonstrate how warped is this indefinite detention policy specifically.
The Guardian has been issued with a statement from the US government which I think is worth posting in full.
It is unfortunate that The New York Times and other news organizations have made the decision to publish numerous documents obtained illegally by Wikileaks concerning the Guantanamo detention facility. These documents contain classified information about current and former GTMO detainees, and we strongly condemn the leaking of this sensitive information.
The Wikileaks releases include Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs) written by the Department of Defence between 2002 and early 2009. These DABs were written based on a range of information available then.
The Guantanamo Review Task Force, established in January 2009, considered the DABs during its review of detainee information. In some cases, the Task Force came to the same conclusions as the DABs. In other instances the Review Task Force came to different conclusions, based on updated or other available information. The assessments of the Guantanamo Review Task Force have not been compromised to Wikileaks. Thus, any given DAB illegally obtained and released by Wikileaks may or may not represent the current view of a given detainee.
Both the previous and the current administrations have made every effort to act with the utmost care and diligence in transferring detainees from Guantanamo. The previous administration transferred 537 detainees; to date, the current Administration has transferred 67. Both administrations have made the protection of American citizens the top priority and we are concerned that the disclosure of these documents could be damaging to those efforts. That said, we will continue to work with allies and partners around the world to mitigate threats to the U.S. and other countries and to work toward the ultimate closure of the Guantanamo detention facility, consistent with good security practices and our values as a nation.
Final post for today. Here's a Guardian gallery featuring the Guantánamo detainees who, according to the leaked files, are the worst of the worst held at the Cuban prison camp.
Thanks for reading. You can read all our coverage of the Guantánamo Bay files here, and we'll have more on the documents tomorrow.