Cooks, drivers, senile men in their 80's, and 14 year old soldiers were "the worst of the worst" imprisoned indefinitely because they purportedly were a threat to America based on stories told by tortured prisoners who said anything they thought their captors wanted to hear. Because only one third of the boys and men taken to Gitmo were captured by American forces, questionable intelligence was used to detain two thirds of the imprisoned. The coerced "confessions" of 8 men was used to build "profiles" on 255 men. The so called intelligence "matrix" was a house of cards.
WASHINGTON — U.S. military intelligence assessing the threat of nearly 800 men held at Guantanamo in many cases used information from a small group of captives whose accounts now appear to be questionable, according to a McClatchy analysis of a trove of secret documents from the facility.
The allegations and observations of just eight detainees were used to help build cases against some 255 men at Guantanamo — roughly a third of all who passed through the prison. Yet the testimony of some of the eight was later questioned by Guantanamo analysts themselves, and the others were subjected to interrogation tactics that defense attorneys say amounted to torture and compromised the veracity of their information.
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Ibn al Shaykh al Libi, a Libyan, told CIA de-briefers in 2004 that he had earlier exaggerated his status in al Qaida because he thought that's what American interrogators wanted to hear. He also said that he fabricated connections between Iraq and al Qaida to avoid mistreatment or torture by Egyptian interrogators. Information from al Libi, thought to have been collected elsewhere, was cited in at least 38 of the Guantanamo files.
Zayn al Abidin Muhammad Husayn, a Saudi-born Palestinian who's known more widely as Abu Zubaydah, was cited in about 127 detainee files. His interrogations are reported to have included at least 83 instances of water boarding, and his attorney, Brent Mickum, recently told McClatchy that "he provided tremendous amounts of information that was worthless."
Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/...
A number of detainees apparently committed suicide after years of abuse and losing hope. Yasser Zahrani served as a cook for the Taliban. Despite his insignificance in the Taliban and his lack of threat to Americans, he was held for years while his mental health declined. His intel sheet said he was a high threat from a detention perspective. Like many prisoners who's punishment far exceeds his crime, Zahrani became oppositional. No details are given on his "suicide".
And now we are giving Bradley Manning the same treatment as Zahrani while Dick Cheney and George Bush collect large government retirement checks.