Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
The Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg and Tom Lasseter have a
must-read review of the latest Wikileaks document release.*
WASHINGTON -- Faced with the worst-ever foreign attack on American soil, the U.S. military set up a human intelligence laboratory at Guantánamo that used interrogation and detention practices 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 intelligence documents from George W. Bush's administration, not meant to surface for 20 years, shows that the military's efforts at Guantánamo often were much less effective than the government has acknowledged. Viewed as a whole, the secret intelligence summaries help explain why in May 2009 President Barack Obama, after ordering his own review of wartime intelligence, called America's experiment at Guantánamo "quite simply a mess."
The documents, more than 750 individual assessments of former and current Guantánamo detainees, show an intelligence operation that was tremendously dependent on informants - both prison-camp snitches repeating what they'd heard from fellow captives and self-described, at times self-aggrandizing, former al-Qaeda insiders turned government witnesses who Pentagon records show have since been released....
In many cases, the detainees made direct allegations of others' involvement in militant activities; in others, they gave contextual information used to help build the edges of a case.
Yet 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, they suggest a sort of mission creep beyond the post-9/11 goal of using interrogations to hunt down the al Qaeda inner circle and sleeper cells.
The file of one captive who now lives in Ireland shows that he was sent to Guantánamo to let U.S. military intelligence gather information on the secret service of Uzbekistan. A man from Bahrain was sent to Guantánamo in June 2002, in part, for interrogation on "personalities in the Bahraini court."
That same month, U.S. troops in Bagram flew to Guantánamo a 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 Guantánamo, 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 Guantánamo intelligence analysts concluded that he wasn't a risk to anyone - and had no worthwhile information. Pentagon records show they sent him home in March 2003, after more than two years in either American or Pakistani custody.
Among the other prisoners: an 89 year-old man suffering from dementia who was held to explain documents he said were his son's; a cameraman from Al Jazeera who was apparently held just to answer questions about the news organization; Taliban transcripts who were there to explain Taliban conscription techniques; a 14 year-old "kidnap victim" who was held because he could potentially describe his kidnappers.
Elsewhere in the files, U.S. military intelligence analysts discussing the dangerousness of two Iraqi men captured in Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan, include this observation: One Iraqi boasted that he had an affair with the other Iraqi's wife, in the husband's house. Both have since been repatriated to Iraq.
And they show how they got it wrong right from the start. On Day One, the camps commander declared the first airlift of 20 men "the worst of the worst," handpicked hardened terrorists plucked from the battlefield and shown shackled on their knees to their world in mute, blinded submission.
Not so, according to the military's own analysis, which has so far set free eight of the first 20 men. The first, as a nobody swept up in the war on terrorism, was released just nine months later.
The documents confirm much of the material found in a tremendously depressing book about the first 100 days at Guantanamo, Karen Greenberg's The Least Worst Place, reviewed at Daily Kos two years ago. The book shows clearly a military team attempting to make this up as they went along:
This, then, was the sand on which the Guantanamo operation was precariously built. It was ominously shifting ground on which no person, no code, and no precedent could weigh in with authority. It was not just a legal black hole, as it came to be called later. It was also a military black hole, a legally compromised operation whose premise would ultimately come to threaten the integrity of the military and those under its command
Depressingly, the documents show that Greenberg's description and analysis of the place were spot on. Guantanamo was, is, and will continue to be a mess, and a black, black stain on the nation. In another fantastic overview, The New Yorker's Amy Davidson points out that the Obama administration might have potentially shifted the narrative on Guantanamo if "Obama had pointed to close-up pictures of the fourteen-year old, or the taxi driver, and really told their stories," but when "confronted with scare tactics, his Administration, as the Washington Post recounted in a long piece Saturday, retreated again and again; and then it just gave up. The White House feared the fear itself."
Unfortunately, it's too late now to change the narrative and undo the damage. The Obama administration owns Guantanamo wholly now, and its statement to "strongly condemn" this WikiLeaks document release seals that deal.
*Amy Davidson notes that WikiLeaks shared the documents with seven news organizations, "on the condition that they evaluate them before they were released," but that from there they were leaked to the NYT, which along with The Guardian and NPR broke the embargo. As she says, "How does that fit the complaint that WikiLeaks rushes things out indiscriminately?"