Wikileaks publishes secret files on Gitmo prisoners

Wikileaks has published secret files on prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, with hundreds more ready to be released in the coming month. In total, internal documents concerning 779 prisoners will be published, according to the site, accounting for every detainee at the facility.

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 Guantánamo -- 758 out of 779 in total -- are described in detail in memoranda from JTF-GTMO, the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo Bay, to US Southern Command in Miami, Florida. These memoranda, which contain JTF-GTMO'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) contain a wealth of important and previously undisclosed information, including health assessments, for example, and, in the cases of the majority of the 171 prisoners who are still held, photos (mostly for the first time ever)...

The Washington Post has launch coverage, focusing on previously unknown information about the whereabouts of Al Qaeda leaders around Sept. 11, 2001. Gitmo Files [Wikileaks]

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Anonymous

someone please tell me why the Facebook kid was “person of the year” and not Assange?
William George

This is one of those many, many vomitous George Bush/ conservative things Obama forgot he was hired to undo. May he forever feel shame.
- Sam
  
  Who, GWB or Obama? Hopefully you mean both, though you used a singular pronoun.
  - Anonymous
    
    One imagines that while Obama is capable of feeling shame, GWB is not.
    - Wally Ballou
      
      One imagines that while Obama is capable of feeling shame, GWB is not.
      
      Doubtless the prisoners who remain at Gitmo are consoled on a daily basis by contemplating Obama’s pangs of conscience.
jimkirk

Another reason to treat Gitmo prisoners civilly…I remember an NPR interview with an actual military interrogator. After pretty much ridiculing waterboarding and such as TV plot-fodder, he described one prisoner whose paperwork said he was diabetic. So the interrogator got him some sugar-free cookies, which sort of broke the ice, they each started seeing each other as a human being, and the guy started sharing information.

The key: seeing each other as human beings.

In other news, I hear America is a Nation of Laws.
Cowicide

Maybe some of us can quit gushing over Russell Brand for a minute and pay tribute to some people at Wikileaks that truly deserve our respect?

Oh, that’s right… Wikileaks (and truth in general) is to be derided and feared by Americans… nevermind…
EH

Hah, earlier today Wikileaks tweeted that they’d be off this week to increase capacity for their servers. I think it’s hilarious timing for them to drop this turd in Obama’s mouth right after the SF incident, then afterwards scurrying away.

Sure, some will say “what a bunch of chickens,” but their job is done. By going offline now they force the mainstream media to be the primary source of information for the Gitmo documents, (basically) removing Wikileaks’ name from the list of culpable actors in publication. Moxie, man.
- TEKNA2007
  
  > Sure, some will say “what a bunch of chickens,” but their job
  > is done. By going offline now they force the mainstream media
  > to be the primary source of information for the Gitmo
  > documents, (basically) removing Wikileaks’ name from the
  > list of culpable actors in publication.
  
  NPR just broadcast an hourly news blurb announcing the completion of analysis, in partnership of the NYT, of what sounds like the same documents. Wikileaks was not mentioned. It seemed to be phrased to take credit for it and to elbow Wikileaks completely out of the picture.
  
  BBC World Service, on the other hand, is explicitly crediting Wikileaks.
  
  I think it’s in Assange’s personal interest for Wikileaks to continue to be seen as doing important and relevant work on the side of the angels.
  - EH
    
    NPR just broadcast an hourly news blurb announcing the completion of analysis, in partnership of the NYT, of what sounds like the same documents. Wikileaks was not mentioned. It seemed to be phrased to take credit for it and to elbow Wikileaks completely out of the picture.
    
    There’s a reason for that:
    https://twitter.com/wikileaks/statuses/62365375911829505
    - TEKNA2007
      
      It seemed to be phrased to take credit for it and to elbow Wikileaks completely out of the picture.
      
      It was disturbing to hear, because it placed them in the fray, instead of reporting on the fray from outside of it.
      
      There’s a reason for that: twitter.com/wikileaks
      
      Any idea what “our 8 group coalition” refers to?
Anonymous

What if Gitmo was never about the GWOT, but just kabuki theater meant for the US public? Why put these ‘terrorists’ 90 or so miles from the US mainland instead of leaving them in their own country? To bring that GWOT closer to home?

I’m pretty sure I know why public trials will never happen for these people…it will (1) become obvious that most of these people were dirt farmers who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The obvious next questions would be: why? What purpose did they serve? And (2) their lawyers would have discovery power to find out who made the decisions to imprison them and on what basis.

When Obama made closing Gitmo a campaign issue, I suspect he honestly did not know just how fraudulent the Bush/Cheney GWOT really was. Because he’s a forward looker (all Democratic Presidents have this flaw), we never get to revisit the crimes of the past administrations (BCCI with Clinton, 9/11 and the illegal war on Iraq with Obama). History will surely repeat itself because no one is ever made accountable.
Rayonic

It’s clearly problematic to take prisoners without a clear legal path for them.

Makes you wonder what’s been happing to all the people that would have gone to Guantanamo if it hadn’t become a political hot potato. Probably imprisoned locally and quietly.

As for Obama’s change of stance, I don’t see why it’s so shocking. Clearly the situation was more complicated than “GITMO BAD!”, but you can’t really communicate that on the campaign trail.
- EH
  
  It’s clearly problematic to take prisoners without a clear legal path for them.
  
  “Problematic” sure is a nice way of putting it.
  
  Obama is still imprisoning people all over the world, GITMO is just the highest profile, the “Manson,” if you will.
  - jerwin
    
    But is it a clear way of putting it?
  - Rayonic
    
    Obama is still imprisoning people all over the world, GITMO is just the highest profile, the “Manson,” if you will.
    
    Look at the upside, this saves a lot of flights to Cuba so it’s better for the environment. You know what they say: Think globally, jail locally.
    
    I guess the alternative would have been to hammer out a sensible policy for dealing with these prisoners years ago, instead of making political hay from it. Oh well.
- Donald Petersen
  
  Clearly the situation was more complicated than “GITMO BAD!”, but you can’t really communicate that on the campaign trail.
  
  Can’t you? During the campaign, I never got the impression that the urge to close GTMO was because the facility in and of itself was somehow lacking in aesthetic appeal, or because they had too many skeletons hanging from the manacles above the scorpion pit, or that the place was being run by Colonel Kurtz, Nurse Ratched, and an entire company of Graners and Englands.
  
  I thought it was made quite clear that the motivation to close the joint stemmed from the fact that a great many Americans found distasteful the fact that the detention camp was founded specifically to circumvent U.S. legal jurisdiction and the Geneva Conventions, and that the detainees appeared to be denied certain Constitutional rights that even the likes of Ted Bundy, Ted Kaczynski, Charles Manson, and Timothy McVeigh enjoyed. It’s all very well for the Bush Administration to assure us that the camp only contains “the worst of the worst,” but it strains credulity pretty hard to assume that GTMO housed seven hundred monsters in human form who are so vile and slippery and vicious and packed with vital intelligence that none of them could be entrusted to a civilian criminal justice system, not even one that handled the aforementioned American villains who were arguably more vicious, more evil, and more diabolical than, say, Osama bin Laden’s chauffeur.
  
  I’m a simple, straightforward, unsophisticated guy with a high school education, so I’m sure I’m missing several of the finer points, but I don’t understand why Obama, who was elected by a fairly comfortable margin on the strength of his campaign promises (not least of which was the “Close GTMO” mandate), who is the Commander in Chief of the military, and who is the head of the Executive Branch under whose direct authority falls the Department of Justice, found himself unable to keep this particular promise. Was there no federal prison to be found within the DoJ’s jurisdiction with enough room? Or are they all run at the state level by spineless governors who quail at the thought of Afghan supervillains (and their drivers) dwelling within yards of their state’s precious domestic murderers and rapists?
  
  Some hippie named Michael Lehnert, commenting on the way the Army was running GTMO, said, “I think we lost the moral high ground. For those who do not think much of the moral high ground, that is not that significant. But for those who think our standing in the international community is important, we need to stand for American values. You have to walk the walk, talk the talk.” Oh, wait… did I say “hippie”? I meant the Marine Corps Brigadier General who ran the place the first 90 days it was open.
  
  Then there’s that Colonel Larry Wilkerson commie. The one who claims that a whole buncha GTMO detainees are actually innocent, and that the Administration knew that early on, but found it politically inexpedient to let them go. Wilkerson must be some looney-tune lefty moonbat terrorist lover, right? Or was he Colin Powell’s chief of staff? I always forget which.
  
  GTMO should be closed because it never should have existed in the first place. Our nation has never needed nor particularly wanted a black hole existing outside the jurisdiction of our courts and our Constitution, if for no other reason than the fact that it doesn’t take a genius to realize that we, all of us, are one bureaucratic SNAFU away from being sent to such a place ourselves. Even if we are the types who would never dream of lifting a finger or voice in opposition to the policies and institutions of these United States, we’ve all heard of or personally experienced cases of mistaken identity or miscarriages of justice or simple clerical errors that can result in the issuance of bench warrants, the impounding of property, or the levying of fines. Isn’t it nice to know that there’s at least some glimmering possibility of recourse under our Constitution, and within the jurisdiction of our justice system, imperfect though it is?
  
  Is it too complicated for the campaign-trail sound bites for a candidate to wonder out loud if we should really place every last bit of the responsibility for the arrest, incarceration, trial, and acquittal or conviction of all these detainees (whether they were captured on foreign soil or domestic) solely in the hands of the military, because absolutely no civilian court can be trusted to handle the truth?
  
  IMHO, Obama’s DoJ made most of the compelling arguments in the right direction… then folded like a cheap suit. It’s humiliating to our nation, it’s humiliating to his party platform, and it should be personally humiliating to him.
  
  But like I said before… what do I know?
  - Mister44
    
    re: “…and that the detainees appeared to be denied certain Constitutional rights that even the likes of Ted Bundy, Ted Kaczynski, Charles Manson, and Timothy McVeigh enjoyed”
    
    Not that I disagree with everything said, but why would our constitiutional rights extend not non-citizen enemy combatants? Heck – the people in the military don’t get to enjoy all of them while serving :o/
    - Brainspore
      
      …why would our constitiutional rights extend not non-citizen enemy combatants?
      
      This isn’t the first time our country has dealt with so-called “enemy combatants.” But in prior wars we generally either
      
      a) Treated them as prisoners of war in accordance with the Geneva conventions, or
      b) Put them on trial through our legal system in accordance with the protections of our constitution.
      
      It wasn’t until Bush declared (and Obama continued) this ridiculously conceived “war on terror” that we invented a whole new class of detainees that basically have no legal protections whatsoever, even the writ of Habeus Corpus. We even built them a prison at Gitmo just to make sure they wouldn’t accidentally get any legal rights by virtue of being on American soil.
      - wigg1es
        
        I’m not the most knowledgeable person in military history by any means, but I’m willing to bet that this isn’t a new phenomenon.
      - Kieran O’Neill
        
        I don’t know — my impression is that, while British or American soldiers on the front may have lost it sometimes (and, for instance, shot surrendering opponents), in the cases of formal interrogation, strict measures were taken to ensure that the Geneva protocol was followed. By contrast, the methods used at Guantanamo are more par-for-the-course under the Nazi regime (or the USSR under Stalin, or [insert fascist/Stalinist regime here]).
        
        At least in the past century, it is something fairly new for the United States.
      - Fiddy
        
        Yeah, that’s the problem with circumventing the constitution when the President decides he/she wants to declare war on something, be it “poverty,” “drugs,” or “terror.” That pesky old Constitution he’s trying to forget about reserves the right to declare war only to the Congress. If congress can pass (by a 2/3 majority) a declaration of war against drugs, poverty or terrorism, then all these things would be hunky dory and the rules would be crystal clear. But that never happened in any of these cases, so we’ve got prisoners of these wars incarcerated and tortured in secret prisons all over the world and when Wikileaks shines a bright light into the shadows of what they’re doing, it makes everyone uncomfortable.
        
        Best to just put it out of your thoughts and go back to scanning headlines for the latest dirt on Charlie Sheen or Lindsay Lohan or… Wait! There’s a wedding going on this week!
    - Kieran O’Neill
      
      It’s an difficult ethical issue, but yes, indeed, why should any of us foreign scum get any kind of human consideration by the obviously superior American citizenry?
    - Anonymous
      
      Treating prisoners well is good to do for your own sake; other countries genuinely do remember what you did with them, and even if they do not always respond in kind, it does influence their own reaction.
    - PrettyBoyTim
      
      Not that I disagree with everything said, but why would our constitiutional rights extend not non-citizen enemy combatants? Heck – the people in the military don’t get to enjoy all of them while serving :o/
      
      The constitutional rights do not seem to limit themselves to Americans. The military does not get the right to a grand jury, but the rest still applies.
      
      From the fifth amendment to the Bill of Rights:
      
      “… nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;”
      
      Now, there are probably lawyers who would argue around this, but I think it’s pretty clear when it says “nor shall any person … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”. I think that’s a good thing. As a British citizen I expect various rights that should not be open to those who are not British or not resident in Britain; the right to vote, for example. However, I expect the right to justice to be applied universally by my government irrespective of who is receiving it. If a human right doesn’t apply to all humans, it’s not a human right.
      
      It’s a shame to see the US government diverging so far from the principles that founded it:
      
      “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
      - aelfscine
        
        That’s why the facility has to be on foreign soil, of course. The Bill of Rights applies to everyone in America, regardless of whether they’re a citizen, illegal immigrant, whatever. An illegal might not get Social Security, but freedom of speech, habeas corpus, and all those other pesky rights apply to absolutely anyone in our borders.
        
        I think the main problem with closing the facility is that they’ve been holding these people so long that even if they didn’t hate America back in 2001, they damn well do now. As usual, we made them dangerous (or more so), and we’re afraid of what will happen if we say ‘Whoops, our bad!’ Especially if we admit that the incarceration was groundless. We’ll obviously never do that, but we’re in a pickle because we’ve held them for so long. If they didn’t do anything, we’re monsters for holding them for a decade. If they did the terrible things we say they did (but haven’t proven), they should be locked up for life.
        
        Personally I think we should just suck it up and close the damn thing – I think the anger would be blunted by the fact it was closed, and Obama could look like a big man while blaming it all on Bush. But of course, THAT would have worked better if he’d done it years ago too…
      - Rob
        
        Read the way the Bill of Rights is written. It doesn’t apply to individuals, it applies to the government. It should be following those restrictions everywhere.
  - Rayonic
    
    the fact that the detention camp was founded specifically to circumvent U.S. legal jurisdiction and the Geneva Conventions
    
    I think the Supreme Court settled that matter in 2004 (Rasul v. Bush). There’s nothing legally magical about Guantanamo Bay itself, and the focus on it kinda detracts from the issue of “enemy combatants” in general.
    
    The sad thing is that if Obama shut down Gitmo immediately by simply moving operations elsewhere, he could’ve avoided all this bad press. Even if everything was the same (or worse), it’d get outweighed by “Gitmo closed!”
    
    Is it too complicated for the campaign-trail sound bites [...]
    
    Judging by the number of surprised supporters, I’d say yes.
Anonymous

Does anyone have any information on how these were redacted? Some of the files are purportedly of informants, and the Guardian has said that it has withheld information deemed to be too sensitive to share, but I’m wondering if this extends to Wikileaks as well.

Generally they are pretty good about redacting information, but I see no mention of it on their website.
Mister44

The reason Obama hasn’t let anyone from Gitmo go, is he has come to the same conclusion Bush and probably any other president would come to.
- wrybread
  
  What conclusion is that exactly? That its way too embarassing to let these people out so they can tell the story of how horribly they were treated by America? I don’t see their continued detention as a vindication of the Bush/Cheney insanity, but rather an indication of just how insane Bush/Cheney were.
Anonymous

Love wikileaks, but MUST we have Assange’s “how YOU doin’” face leering out at us from every page?
Mister44

re: “It’s an difficult ethical issue, but yes, indeed, why should any of us foreign scum get any kind of human consideration by the obviously superior American citizenry?”

Yes, that is what I said, that foreigners should not get any kind of human consideration.

No – what I asked was if enemy combatants would automatically enjoy ‘constitutional rights’ from a constitution they have no loyalty to from a country whose laws they are not directly governed under. This doesn’t mean they would get NO rights whatsoever.

@wrybread re: “What conclusion is that exactly?”

That the people in Gitmo you may not be able to successfully try in a traditional court system, but letting them go isn’t an option either.
- Donald Petersen
  
  That the people in Gitmo you may not be able to successfully try in a traditional court system, but letting them go isn’t an option either.
  
  See, that’s probably the part that bugs me the most. What exactly do you mean by “successfully try in a traditional court system”? Do you mean guaranteed convictions? Because that, my friend, does not constitute a trial.
  
  How hard could this possibly be? Let’s adopt for the sake of argument the specious assumption that every detainee in GTMO was legitimately apprehended in the process or in the wake of performing some genuinely nefarious deed. Lock the guy up, schedule an arraignment, get moving with gathering evidence, put a case together, all that crap. If there are national security issues that make the evidence too sensitive to be made public (or even known outside of fairly high-level security clearances), then go ahead and use a military tribunal if you must, or better yet, put together a civilian court that actually has a modicum of security clearance. At this point, one could have simply delayed the trial by several years until most of the actionable intelligence or sensitive information was completely out-of-date, and such trials would still be years in our past by now. But even if a jury trial is completely out of the question due to security concerns, one could fire up the military tribunal and get cracking.
  
  What’s that? You mean there might be a chance they can’t convict? Some of the evidence might be somewhat less than perfectly untainted? Some of the testimony might be less than reliable? Some of the intelligence might be less than intelligent? You mean… you don’t have a solid enough case to try?
  
  My goodness. What a pity. Then LET THE GUY GO FREE!!!
  
  If you have in custody someone you just know in your heart to be A Very Bad Egg, who will turn into a real liability if he ever goes free again, then goddammit you’ve gotta be able to prove it. I haven’t taken a roll call, but isn’t it just possible that there might be people in GTMO who have never fired a shot in anger in their lives? You have people there who were busted for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and for being philosophically opposed to our way of life, and for funding or otherwise aiding what we so blithely term “The Enemy,” and yet who may not have done a thing to physically harm our people or our interests. Not everyone there, to be sure, maybe not even most… but some. And yet somehow our government can’t even do like they did with Al Capone, and bust them on tax evasion if they can’t nail them for anything else. If there’s anyone in GTMO who can’t be “successfully” tried because the evidence does not guarantee a conviction, then we gotta let them go, and it does not matter one bit how dangerous we have made them by locking them up without cause for this long.
  
  Hell, there’s even a script that could have been used in 2009. “We are going to release you. We find that we do not have sufficient evidence to detain you. Our previous regime was over-enthusiastic in its pursuit of suspected al-Qaeda operatives and supporters, and though they captured some genuine evildoers whose trials now proceed apace, in their zeal to avenge the tragedy of September 11, they also regrettably apprehended some innocent folk like you. This should have been rectified years ago, but it is only now under the Obama Administration that cooler heads can prevail. We apologize for the un-American way our predecessors have treated you, and we sorely regret their mistake. At the same time, we warn you that we take utterly seriously the safety of our nation and its interests, and though we are committed to showing mercy to the innocent, we will relentlessly pursue the guilty to the ends of the earth. We caught you once before. If you act against the United States in the future, be sure that we will catch you again.” Of course, now it’s a bit late for even that bit of Pollyannaish twaddle to fly. But the fact remains that we live in a country where thieves, rapists, murderers, burglars, batterers and embezzlers walk free every week due to a weakness in the prosecution’s case, and yet people who were once vaguely suspected of terrorist-sympathizing proclivities get locked up indefinitely without hope of a trial, let alone an apology. You may have heard that John Hinckley, Jr., the guy who shot Reagan, spends about 120 days a year at his mom’s house and even has a driver’s license. Guy who drove bin Laden around? A day in court is too good for the likes of him.
  
  If we want to continue pretending we live under the Rule of Law, then our shared values must be consistently applied. “American Exceptionalism” utterly depends on it, for one thing. If we allow the GTMO policy to stand, then it’s only a matter of time before the powers that be feel emboldened to round up all us decent clean white Christian folk who happen to disagree with them on certain matters. Is that what it’ll take for the country to realize just how profoundly wrong this whole thing is?
  
  Of course it is. “They’re not Americans, so they don’t deserve our Constitutional protections.” Jesus wept.
  - travtastic
    
    Personally, I vote that we expand the Gitmo system to more traditional civilian matters. John Q. Citizen is suspected of smoking pot? Let’s hold him for a few years, until we can find a method that will never find him innocent.
straponego

When you hear the media report on these documents, note how certain topics are framed. For example, even NPR always mentions that some of these prisoners “return to” terrorism upon release. In this context they never, ever mention the fact that even by the government’s own admission, many of these men were innocent. Now imagine that you were sold to the US for a reward, imprisoned for years without ever being charged with a crime, regularly tortured, told your family would be raped and murdered. One day you are released. Probably some of your family and friends were killed by indiscriminate US bombing or gunfire; or by US mercenaries having a little fun.

If this happened to you, would you shrug it off? No hard feelings?

I’ll tell you this. If you torture me and murder my family, we are not going to be friends.
- travtastic
  
  And the beauty of it all is, the more we mistreat innocent people, the more people we legitimately piss off, and now we can mistreat even more innocent people!
  
  If preventing real terrorism had ever been one of our goals, even one just tangentially related to the primary goal, Guantanamo would have been closed down years ago.
- Mister44
  
  Yeah – but what percentage? I am sure there are/were innocent people. But I think it would be naive to think that most of these people are/were not.
  - straponego
    
    I pointed out that NPR and the rest of the soi-disant “liberal” media continually assert that 100% of these men are guilty, when these documents show that over 150 of the detainees are known to be innocent even in the eyes of our military. Since they does not constitute a “majority”, I suppose you are suggesting it’s okay to imprison and torture them. Is that a 50.1% deal, 51%, what? Can’t make an omelet without torturing a few hundred guys, after all.
    
    Oh, and some of them were never suspected of any crimes. Like the Al Jazeera journalist they kidnapped. But hey, as long as long as there is one fewer innocent, bring out the electrodes. Slice those penises. We’ll teach them not to hate our freedom.
    
    Actually… once they’ve been detained and tortured this long, we may as well execute them all. It’s the only way to be sure none of them will ever hit back. And it’s more humane than the life most of them can look forward to under American human rights standards.