[Ppnews] 'Guantanamo files' - Dozens held were innocent

[Political Prisoner News]

'Guantanamo files' - Dozens held were innocent
Leaked files reveal details of interrogations of 
"high-risk" detainees, but suggest many innocents were also rounded up.

April 25, 2011

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2011/04/201142561524783918.html

The United States released dozens of so-called 
"high-risk" detainees from the Guantanamo Bay 
prison facility and held more than 150 innocent 
men for years, according to new reports about a 
trove of leaked military documents.

The more than 700 classified military files, part 
of a massive cache of secret documents leaked to 
the <http://wikileaks.ch/gitmo/>whistle-blowing 
website WikiLeaks, were made available to select 
US and European media outlets and made public on Sunday.

It was not clear if the media outlets published 
the documents with the consent of WikiLeaks - and 
it was not immediately possible to independently 
verify all of the leaked documents.

The files are reported to reveal new information 
about some of the men held at the US prison 
facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including 
details of the more than 700 detainee 
interrogations and evidence the US had collected against the "terror" suspects.

The files - called Detainee Assessment Briefs or 
DABs - describe the security intelligence value 
of the detainees and whether they would be a 
threat to the US and its allies if released.

'High-risk' threat

To date, 604 inmates have been transferred out of 
Guantanamo while 172 remain detained.

Thousands of pages of the files are reported to 
reveal that most of the prisoners who remain at 
Guantanamo - 130 of them - have been rated as 
posing a "high-risk'" threat to the US if they 
are freed without rehabilitation or supervision.

Even more of the George W Bush-era "war on 
terror" suspects were branded "high-risk" before 
being released or handed to other governments, 
<http://www.nytimes.com/guantanamo-files/>The New 
York Times, one of the newspapers that received the documents, reported.

The documents show some inmates were described as 
more dangerous than previously known to the 
public and could complicate efforts by the US to 
transfer detainees out of the prison.

However, the documents also show that dozens of 
detainees were found to be innocent, after being held for lengthy periods.

At least 150 people were innocent Afghans or 
Pakistanis, including drivers, farmers and chefs, 
who were rounded up as part of frantic 
intelligence gathering, and then detained for years.

In several cases, senior US commanders were said 
to have concluded that there is "no reason recorded for transfer".

Al Jazeera file

The documents also show instances in which 
authorities were concerned less with containing 
dangerous suspects than on extracting intelligence.

Sami al-Hajj was working as an Al Jazeera 
cameraman when he was arrested in 2001 and sent to Guantanamo

One file shows that Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera 
journalist held at Guantanamo for six years, was 
detained partly in order to be interrogated about the news network.

<http://wikileaks.ch/gitmo/prisoner/345.html>His 
file states that one of the reasons he was 
detained was "to provide information on 
 the Al 
Jazeera news network's training programme, 
telecommunications equipment, and newsgathering 
operations in Chechnya, Kosovo and Afghanistan, 
including the network's acquisition of a video of 
UBL [Osama bin Laden] and a subsequent interview with UBL".

Al-Hajj was released in 2008 and has since returned to work for Al Jazeera.

Hundreds of other detainees reportedly underwent 
aggressive interrogation techniques before it was 
determined that they were low-level fighters.

Legal limbo

The administration of US president Barack Obama 
criticised the publication of the files as 
"unfortunate", calling them "sensitive information".

"It is unfortunate that several news 
organisations have made the decision to publish 
numerous documents obtained illegally by 
WikiLeaks concerning the Guantanamo detention 
facility,'' ambassador Daniel Fried, the Obama 
administration's special envoy on detainee 
issues, and Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell, said in a joint statement.

But they added that the documents were out of 
date, and that the administration's Guantanamo 
review panel, established in January 2009, had made its own assessments.

"The assessments of the Guantanamo Review Task 
Force have not been compromised to WikiLeaks. 
Thus, any given DAB (Detainee Assessment Briefs) 
illegally obtained and released by WikiLeaks may 
or may not represent the current view of a given detainee."

Obama pledged two years ago to close the prison, but it remains in legal limbo.




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