WikiLeaks Feature: The Revelations About Guantanamo Bay (Rosenberg and Lasseter)

This morning, WikiLeaks has begun the publication of 779 individual assessments by US authorities of former and current Guantanamo detainees. WikiLeaks has put up 67 of the files so far; meanwhile, seven news organisations have been given the entire set to prepare stories.

See also Obama Special: How the Administration Abandoned Its Promise to Close Guantanamo (Finn and Kornblut)

We begin coverage with the article from Carol Rosenberg and Tom Lasseter for one of those news outlets, McClatchy:

Faced with the worst-ever single attack by foreigners on American soil, the U.S. military set up a human intelligence laboratory at Guantanamo that used interrogation and detention practices that they largely made up as they went along.

The world may have thought the U.S. was detaining a band of international terrorists whose questioning would help the hunt for Osama Bin Laden or foil the next 9/11.

But a collection of secret Bush-era intelligence documents not meant to surface for another 20 years shows that the military's efforts at Guantanamo often were much less effective than the government has acknowledged....

Information from just eight men showed up in forms for at least 235 Guantanamo detainees --- some 30 percent of those known to have been held there....

The documents also show that in the earliest years of the prison camps operation, the Pentagon permitted Chinese and Russian interrogators into the camps --- information from those sessions are included in some captives' assessments --- something American defense lawyers working free-of-charge for the foreign prisoners have alleged and protested for years. 

There's not a whiff in the documents that any of the work is leading the U.S. closer to capturing Bin Laden. In fact, the documents suggest a sort of mission creep beyond the post-9/11 goal of hunting down the al Qaida inner circle and sleeper cells.

The file of one captive, now living in Ireland, shows he was sent to Guantanamo so that U.S. military intelligence could gather information on the secret service of Uzbekistan. A man from Bahrain is shipped to Guantanamo in June 2002, in part, for interrogation on "personalities in the Bahraini court."

That same month, U.S. troops in Bagram airlifted to Guantanamo a 30-something sharecropper whom Pakistani security forces scooped up along the Afghan border as he returned home from his uncle's funeral.

The idea was that, once at Guantanamo, 8,000 miles from his home, he might be able to tell interrogators about covert travel routes through the Afghan-Pakistan mountain region. Seven months later, the Guantanamo intelligence analysts concluded that he wasn't a risk to anyone — and had no worthwhile information. Pentagon records show they shipped him home in March 2003, after more than two years in either American or Pakistani custody.

Read full article....