WikiLeaks files describe detainees

WASHINGTON – Faced with the worst-ever foreign attack on American soil, the U.S. military set up a human intelligence laboratory at Guantanamo 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 Guantanamo 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 Guantanamo “quite simply a mess.”

The documents, more than 750 individual assessments of former and current Guantanamo 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-Qaida insiders turned government witnesses who Pentagon records show have since been released.

Intelligence analysts are at odds with each other over which informants to trust, at times drawing inferences from prisoners’ exercise habits. They ordered DNA tests, tethered Taliban suspects to polygraphs, and strung together tidbits in ways that seemed to defy common sense.

Guantanamo analysts at times questioned the reliability of some information gleaned from other detainees’ interrogations.

Allegations and information from one Yemeni, no longer at Guantanamo, appear in at least 135 detainees’ files, prompting Navy Rear Adm. Dave Thomas, the prison camp’s commander in August 2008, to include this warning: “Any information provided should be adequately verified through other sources before being utilized.”

The same report goes on to praise the captive as an “invaluable intelligence source” for information about al-Qaida and Taliban training, operations, personnel and facilities,” and warns that he would be at risk of retaliation if he were released into Yemeni society. He was resettled in Europe by the Obama administration.

In fact, information from just eight men showed up in forms for at least 235 Guantanamo detainees – 30 percent of those known to have been held there.

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.

While many other intelligence sources were referred to in those detainee assessment forms, including in some cases confessions by the detainees themselves, the inclusion of information from such a highly questionable group of men would seem to raise serious issues about a key piece of the “mosaic” process at Guantanamo and the decisions that followed.

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-Qaida inner circle and sleeper cells.

The file of one captive who now lives in Ireland shows that he was sent to Guantanamo to let U.S. military intelligence gather information on the secret service of Uzbekistan. A man from Bahrain was sent to Guantanamo in June 2002, in part, for interrogation on “personalities in the Bahraini court.”

McClatchy Newspapers obtained the documents last month from WikiLeaks on an embargoed basis to give reporters time to catalog, evaluate and report on them. WikiLeaks abruptly lifted the embargo Sunday night.

The documents consist of more than 750 intelligence summaries. They were written from 2002 to 2008. Many include photographs of the men, information about each man’s physical and mental health, and recommendations on whether to keep them in U.S. custody, hand them over to foreign governments for imprisonment, or set them free.