 Introduction to the Guantanamo Bay Files from WikiLeaks Get One Files WikiLeaks reveals secret files on all Guantanamo prisoners In its latest release of classified U.S. documents, WikiLeaks is shining the light on truth on a notorious icon of the Bush administration's war on terror. The prison at Guantanamo Bay Cuba, which opened on January 11, 2002, and remains open under President Obama despite his promise to close the much-criticized facility within a year of taking office. In thousands of pages of documents dating from 2002 to 2008, and never seen before by members of the public or the media, the cases of the majority of the prisoners held at Guantanamo, 765 out of 779 in total, are described in detail in memoranda from JTF Gitmo, the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, to U.S. Southern Command in Miami, Florida. These memoranda, known as detainee assessment briefs, DABs, contain JTF's Gitmo's recommendations about whether the prisoners in question should continue to be held or should be released transferred to their home, governments, or to other governments. They consist of a wealth of important and previously undisclosed information, including health assessments, for example, and in the cases of the majority of the 272 prisoners who are still held, photos, mostly for the first time ever. They also include information on the first 201 prisoners released from the prison between 2002 and 2004, which, unlike information on the rest of the prisoners, summaries of evidence and tribunal transcripts, released as the result of a lawsuit filed by media groups in 2006, has never been made public before. Most of these documents reveal accounts of incompetence familiar to those who have studied Guantanamo closely, with innocent men detained by mistake or because the U.S. is offering substantial bounties to its allies for al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects, and numerous insignificant Taliban conscripts from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Beyond these previously unknown cases, the documents also reveal stories of 399 other prisoners released from September 2004 to the present day, and of the seven men who have died at the prison. The memos are signed by the commander of Guantanamo at the time and describe whether the prisoners in question are regarded as low, medium, or high risk. Although they were obviously not conclusive in and of themselves, as final decisions about the disposition of prisoners were taken at a high level, they represent not only the opinions of JTF Gitmo, but also the criminal investigation task force created by the Department of Defense to conduct interrogations in the war on terror, and the BSCTs, the behavior science teams, consisting psychologists who had a major say in the exploitation of prisoners in interrogation. Crucially, the files also contain detailed explanations of the supposed intelligence used to justify the prisoners' detention. For many readers, these will be the most fascinating sections of the documents, as they seem to offer an extraordinary insight into the workings of U.S. intelligence, but also many documents appear to promise proof of prisoners' association with al-Qaeda or other terrorist organizations. Extreme caution is required. The documents draw on the testimony of witnesses, in most cases the prisoners' fellow prisoners, whose words are unreliable either because they were subjected to torture or other forms of coercion, sometimes not in Guantanamo, but in secret prisons run by the CIA, or because they provided false statements to secure better treatment in Guantanamo. Regular appearances throughout these documents by witnesses whose words should be regarded as untrustworthy include the following high level detainees or ghost prisoners. Please note that ISN and the numbers in brackets following the prisoners' names refer to the short intermittent serial numbers by which the prisoners are or were identified in U.S. custody. Abu Zabagadi, 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 Zabagadi was moved to Guantanamo with 13 other high value detainees in September 2006. Iman al-Shaki al-Libi, ISN 212, the emir of a military training camp for which Abu Zabdabi 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 Torah Bora. Soon after his capture in December 2001, al-Libi was rendered by the CIA to Egypt, where under torture he falsely confessed that an 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 Guantanamo, 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. Sharkoawi Abda Ali al-Hajj, ISN 1457, a Yemeni, also known as Riyadh the facilitator, who was seized in House raid in Pakistan in February 2002 and is described as al-Qaeda's 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 2 years and was then held for 6 months in US facilities in Afghanistan. He was flown to Guantanamo in September 2004. sada yaslam al-Kazini, ISN 1453, a Yemeni, who was seized in the UAE in January 2003 and then held in 3 secret prisons, including the dark prison near Abul and secret facility within the US prison at Bagram Air Base. In 2010, in the district court in Washington DC, Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. granted the habeas corpus petition of a Yemeni prisoner Utham Abda Ra Muhammad Yuthman, largely because he refused to accept testimony produced by either Sharkoawi al-Hajj or Sanad al-Kazini, as he stated, quote, the court will not rely on the statement of Hajj or Kazimi because there is unreputed evidence in the record that at the time of the interrogation at which they made the statements, both men had recently been tortured, end quote. Others include Ahmad Kaflan Kalani, ISN 10012 and Walid bin Atash, ISN 10014, two more of the high value detainees transferred to Guantanamo in September 2006 after being held in secret CIA prisons. Other unreliable witnesses held at Guantanamo throughout their detention include Yasim Basradi, ISN 252, a Yemeni known as a notorious liar as the Washington Post reported in February 2009. He was given preferential treatment in Guantanamo after becoming what some officials regarded as a significant informant, although there were many reasons to be doubtful. As the Post noted, military officials expressed reservations about the credibility of their star witness since 2004 and in 2006, in an article for the National Journal, Khorin Haigland described how, after a combatant status review tribunal at which a prisoner had taken exception to information provided by Basrada, policing at a training camp before he had even arrived in Afghanistan. His personal representative, a military official assigned instead of a lawyer, investigated Basradi's file and found that he had made similar claims about 60 other prisoners in total. In January 2009, in the district court in Washington D.C., Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of George W. Bush, excluded Basrada's statement while granting the habeas corpus petition of Muhammad El-Gharani, a Chadden national who was just 14 years old when he was seized in a raid on a mosque in Pakistan. Judge Leon noted that the government had specifically cautioned against relying on his statements without independent corroboration and in other habeas cases that followed. Other judges relied on this precedent, discrediting the star witness further. Muhammad El-Gharani, ISN 063, a Saudi regarded as the planned 20th hijacker of the 9-11 attacks, was subjected to a specific torture program at Guantanamo, approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. This consisted of 20-hour interrogations every day over a period of several months and various other enhanced interrogation techniques, which severely endangered his health. Variations of these techniques then migrated to other prisoners in Guantanamo and to Abu Ghraib and in January 2009, just before George W. Bush left office, Susan Crawford, a retired judge and a close friend of Dick Cheney and David R. Addington, who was appointed to oversee the military commissions at Guantanamo as the convening authority, told Bob Woodworth that she had refused to press charges against El-Gharani because, as she said, we tortured Khadani. His treatment meant the legal definition of torture. As a result, his numerous statements about other prisoners must be regarded as worthless. Abdul al-Hakim Bakari, ISN 493, a Saudi imprisoned by al-Qaeda as a spy, who was liberated by US forces from a Taliban jail before being sent inexplicably to Guantanamo, along with four other men liberated from the jail, is regarded in the files as a member of al-Qaeda and a trustworthy witness. Abdul al-Rahin Janko, ISN 489, a Syrian Kurd tortured by al-Qaeda as a spy, and then imprisoned by the Taliban along with Abdul al-Hakim Bakrani above, is also used as a witness, even though he was mentally unstable. As his assessment in June 2008 stated, Detainee is on a list of high-risk detainees from a health perspective. He has several chronic medical problems. He has a psychiatric history of substance abuse, depression, borderline personality disorder, and prior suicide attempt for which he is followed by behavioral health for treatment. These are just some of the most obvious cases, but alert readers will notice that they are cited repeatedly in what purports to be a government's evidence, and it should, as a result, be difficult not to conclude that the entire edifice constructed by the government is fundamentally unsound, and that what the Guantanamo files reveal, primarily, is that only a few dozen prisoners are genuinely accused of involvement in terrorism. The rest these documents reveal on close inspection were either innocent men and boys seized by mistake or Taliban foot soldiers unconnected to terrorism. Moreover, many of these prisoners were actually sold to US forces who were offering bounty payments for al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects. By their Afghanistan and Pakistani allies, a policy that led ex-president Moshehra to state in his 2006 memoir, In the Line of Fire, that in return for handing over 369 terrorist suspects to the US, the Pakistani government earned bounty payments totaling millions of dollars. Uncomfortable facts like these are not revealed in the deliberation of the Joint Task Force, but they are crucial to understanding why what can appear to be a collection of documents confirming the government's scaremongering rhetoric about Guantanamo, the same rhetoric that has paralyzed President Obama and revived the politics of fear in Congress, is actually the opposite. The anatomy of a colossal crime perpetrated by the US government on 779 prisoners who, for the most part, are not and never have been the terrorists the government would like us to believe they are. Written by Andy Worthington How to Read WikiLeaks Guantanamo Files Nearly 800 documents in WikiLeaks' latest release of classified US documents are Memoranda from Joint Task Force Guantanamo, JTF Gitmo, The combined force is charged of the US War on Terror prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to US Southern Command in Miami, Florida regarding the disposition of the prisoners. Written between 2002 and 2008, the Memoranda were all marked as secret, and their subject was whether to continue holding a prisoner or whether to recommend his release, described as the transfer to the custody of his own government or that of some other government. They were obviously not conclusive in and out of themselves, as final decisions about the depositions of prisoners were taken at a higher level, but they are very significant as they represent not only the opinions of JTF Gitmo, but also the criminal investigation task force created by the Department of Defense to conduct interrogations in the war on terror, and the BCSTs, the behavioral science teams, consisting of psychologists who had a major say in the exploitation of prisoners in interrogation. Under the heading JTF Gitmo Detainee Assessment, the memos generally contain 9 sections describing the prisoners as follows, although the earlier examples, specifically those dealing with prisoners released or recommended for release between 2002 and 2004, may have less detailed analysis than the following. 1. Prisoner Information Each prisoner is identified by name, by alias, which the US claims to have identified, by place and date of birth, by citizenship, and by internment serial number, ISN. These long lists of numbers and letters, for example, US9YM-00027DP, are used to identify the prisoners in Guantanamo, helping to dehumanize them as intended, by doing away with their names. The most significant section is the number towards the end, which is generally shortened so that the example above would be known as ISN-027. In the files, the prisoners are identified by nationality, with 47 countries in total listed alphabetically, from AZ for Afghanistan to YM for Yemen. 2. Health This section describes whether or not the prisoner in question has mental health issues and or physical health issues. Many are judged to be in good health, but there are some shocking examples of prisoners with severe mental and or physical problems. 3. JTF Gitmo Assessment A. Under recommendations, the task force explains whether a prisoner should continue to be held or should be released. B. Under executive summary, the task force briefly explains its reasoning and in more recent cases, also explains whether the prisoner is a low, medium or high risk as a threat to the US and its allies and as a threat in detention, i.e. based on their behavior in Guantanamo, and also whether they are regarded as of low, medium or high intelligence value. C. Under summary of changes, the task force explains whether there has been any change in the information provided since the last appraisal, generally the prisoners are appraised on an annual basis. 4. Detainees' Account of Events Based on the prisoner's own testimony, this section puts together an account of their history and how they came to be seized in Afghanistan, Pakistan or elsewhere based on their own words. 5. Capture Information This section explains how and where the prisoners were seized and is followed by a description of their possessions at the time of capture, the date of their transfer to Guantanamo and spursely reasons for transfer to JTF Gitmo, which lists alleged reasons for the prisoner's transfer, such as knowledge of certain topics for exploitation through interrogation. The reason that this is unconvincing is because, as former interrogator Chris McKay, a pseudonym explaining this book, the interrogators, the US High Command, based in Camp Doa, Kuwait, stipulated that every prisoner who ended up in US custody had to be transferred to Guantanamo and that there were no exceptions, in other words, the reasons for transfer were grafted on afterwards as an attempt to justify the largely random rounding up of prisoners. 6. Evaluation of Detainees Account In this section, the task force analyzes whether or not they find the prisoner's accounts convincing. 7. Detainee Threat This section is the most significant from the point of view of the supposed intelligence used to justify the detention of prisoners. After assessment, which reiterates the conclusion of at 3B, the main section, reason for continued detention, may at first glance look convincing, but it must be stressed that, for the most part, it consists of little more than unreliable statements made by the prisoner's fellow prisoners, either in Guantanamo or in secret prisons run by the CIA, where torture and other forms of coercion were widespread, or through more subtle means in Guantanamo, where compliant prisoners who were prepared to make statements about their fellow prisoners were rewarded with better treatment. Some examples are available on the homepage for the release of these documents. With this in mind, it should be noted that there are good reasons why Obama administration officials in the Interagency Guantanamo Review Task Force established by the President to review the cases of the 241 prisoners still held in Guantanamo when he took office concluded that only 36 could be prosecuted. The final part of this section, Detainee Conduct, analyzes in detail how the prisoners have behaved during their imprisonment with exact figures cited for examples of disciplinary infractions. 8. Detainee Intelligence Value Assessment After reiterating the intelligence assessment at 3B and recapping on the prisoner's alleged status, this section primarily assesses which area of intelligence remained to be exploited according to the Task Force. 9. EC Status The final section notes whether or not the prisoners in question is still regarded as an enemy combatant based on the findings of the combatant status review tribunals held in 2004-2005 to ascertain whether, on capture, the prisoners had been correctly labeled as enemy combatants. Out of 558 cases, just 38 prisoners were assessed as being no longer enemy combatants, and in some cases, when the result went in the prisoners' favor, the military convened new panels until it got the desired result.