New secrets of dreaded prison

The documentsobtained by WikiLeaks last year but provided to The New York times by another sourcemeticulously record the detainees pocket litter when they were captured: a bus ticket to Kabul,a fake passport and forged student ID,a restaurant receipt,even a poem. They list the prisoners illnesseshepatitis,gout,tuberculosis,depression. They describe inmates infractionspunching guards,tearing apart shower shoes,shouting across cellblocks. And,as analysts try to bolster the case for continued incarceration,they record years of detainees comments about one another.

The secret documents reveal that most of the 172 remaining prisoners have been rated as a high risk of posing a threat to the US and its allies if released without adequate rehabilitation and supervision. But they also show that an even larger number of the prisoners who have left Cubaabout a third of the 600 already transferred to other countrieswere also designated high risk before they were freed or passed to the custody of other governments.

The documents,prepared under the Bush administration,are largely silent about the use of the harsh interrogation tactics at Guantanamoincluding sleep deprivation,shackling in stress positions and prolonged exposure to cold temperaturesthat drew global condemnation. Several prisoners,though,are portrayed as making up false stories about being subjected to abuse.

The military analysts files provide new details about the most infamous of their prisoners,Khalid Shaikh Mohammed,the planner of the September 11,2001,attacks. Sometime around March 2002,he ordered a former Baltimore resident to don a suicide bomb vest and carry out a martyrdom attack against Pervez Musharraf,then Pakistans president,according to the documents. But when the man,Majid Khan,got to the mosque that he had been told Musharraf would visit,the assignment turned out to be just a test of his willingness to die for the cause.

The dossiers also show the seat-of-the-pants intelligence gathering in war zones that led to the incarcerations of innocent men for years in cases of mistaken identity or simple misfortune.

The findings

The 20th hijacker: The best-documented case of an abusive interrogation at Guantanamo was the questioning,in late 2002 and early 2003,of Mohammed Qahtani. A Saudi believed to have been an intended participant in the 9/11 attacks,Qahtani was leashed like a dog,sexually humiliated and forced to urinate on himself. His file says,Although publicly released records allege detainee was subject to harsh interrogation techniques in the early stages of detention, his confessions appear to be true and are corroborated in reporting from other sources.

A Qaeda leaders reputation: The file for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri,who was charged before a military commission last week for plotting the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in 2000,says he was more senior in al-Qaeda than Khalid Shaikh Mohammed,and describes him as so dedicated to jihad that he reportedly received injections to promote impotence and recommended the injections to others so more time could be spent on the jihad (rather than being distracted by women).

The Yemenis hard luck: The files for dozens of the remaining prisoners portray them as low-level foot-soldiers who traveled from Yemen to Afghanistan before the September 11 attacks to receive basic military training and fight in the civil war there,not as global terrorists. Otherwise identical detainees from other countries were sent home many years ago,the files show,but the Yemenis remain at Guantanamo because of concerns over the stability of their country and its ability to monitor them.

A journalists interrogation: The documents show that a major reason a Sudanese cameraman for Al Jazeera,Sami al-Hajj,was held at Guantanamo for six years was to question him about the television networks training programme,telecommunications equipment,and newsgathering operations in Chechnya,Kosovo,and Afghanistan, including contacts with terrorist groups. While Hajj insisted he was just a journalist,his file says he helped Islamic extremist groups courier money and obtain Stinger missiles and cites the UAEs claim that he was a Qaeda member. He was released in 2008 and returned to work for Al Jazeera.

The first to leave: The documents offer the first public look at the militarys views of 158 detainees who did not receive a formal hearing under a system instituted in 2004. Many were assessed to be of little intelligence value with no ties to or significant knowledge about al-Qaeda or the Taliban,as was the case of a detainee who was an Afghan used-car salesman. But also among those freed early was a Pakistani who would become a suicide attacker three years later.

The Guantanamo assessments seem unlikely to end the long-running debate about Americas most controversial prison. The documents can be mined for evidence supporting beliefs across the political spectrum about the relative perils posed by the detainees and whether the governments system of holding most without trials is justified. Much of the information in the documents is impossible to verify.

In 2009,a task force of officials from the governments national security agencies re-evaluated all 240 detainees then remaining at the prison. They vetted the militarys assessments against information held by other agencies,and dropped the high/medium/low risk ratings in favour of a more nuanced look at how each detainee might fare if released,in light of his specific family and national environment. But those newer assessments are still secret and not available for comparison. Moreover,the leaked archive is not complete; it contains no assessments for about 75 of the detainees.

Yet for all the limitations of the files,they still offer an extraordinary look inside a prison that has long been known for its secrecy and for a struggle between the military that runs it and detainees who often fought back with the limited tools available to them.

Scores of detainees were given disciplinary citations for inappropriate use of bodily fluids, as some files delicately say; other files make clear that detainees on a fairly regular basis were accused by guards of throwing urine and feces.

No new prisoners have been transferred to Guantanamo since 2007. Some Republicans are urging the Obama administration to send newly captured terrorism suspects to the prison,but so far officials have refused to increase the inmate population. As a result,Guantanamo seems increasingly frozen in time,with detainees locked into their roles at the receding moment of their capture.

Unfortunate,says US

Following is the US governments response to the release of classified documents on Guantanamo Bay.

It is unfortunate that…news organisations have made the decision to publish numerous documents obtained illegally by Wikileaks concerning the Guantanamo detention facility…we strongly condemn the leaking of this sensitive information.

The Guantanamo Review Task Force,established in January 2009,considered the DABs (Detainee Assessment Briefs) during its review of detainee information. In some cases,the Task Force came to the same conclusions as the DABs. In other instances the Review Task Force came to different conclusions,based on updated or other available information.

Both the previous and the current Administrations have made every effort to act with the utmost care and diligence in transferring detainees from Guantanamo. The previous Administration transferred 537 detainees; to date,the current Administration has transferred 67…We will…work toward the ultimate closure of the Guantanamo detention facility…