Posted on 04/24/2011 7:12:34 PM PDT by kristinn
Thousands of pages of previously secret military documents about detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison now put a name, a history and a face on hundreds of men in captivity there. The documents include details on 158 men on whom no information has ever been released.
The hundreds of classified documents - marked "secret" and "noforn" meaning the information is not to be shared with representatives of other countries - are assessments, interviews and internal memos from the Pentagon's Joint Task Force at Guantanamo. The task force was supposed to determine who the detainees were, how they might be connected to terrorism and whether they posed a threat to the U.S. and its allies in the future.
The files are part of a trove of classified information that was leaked last year to the anti-secrecy website Wikileaks. They were made available to the New York Times by another source, on condition of anonymity. NPR is reporting on the documents with the Times.
These intelligence summaries and assessments - which date back as far as 2002 and run until the beginning of 2009 - pull back the curtain on a sometimes chaotic process as officials at Guantanamo tried to determine whether detainees continue to be held, released to a third country, or prosecuted for terrorism and other crimes.
Among the findings in the files:
A former detainee, Abu Sufian Ibrahim Ahmed Hamuda Bin Qumu, who is believed to be training rebel forces in Libya, has closer ties to al-Qaida than previously understood publicly. According to his detainee assessment, Qumu allegedly trained at two al-Qaida camps, fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets and the Northern Alliance, and moved to Sudan with other al-Qaida members.
There is new detail on a senior explosives trainer for al-Qaida, Tariq Mahmud Ahmad al Sawah, the man who claimed to have designed the prototype for a shoe bomb that failed ignite on a US plane in 2001. He was recommended for release from the prison because of his cooperation with authorities.
Shaker Aamer, also known as Sawad al-Madani, and called "the professor" at Guantanamo, said he had no connection to al-Qaida. His military assessment says he was Osama bin Laden's personal English translator.
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the suspected plotter of the U.S.S Cole attack in Yemen, reported directly to Osama bin Laden, according to the documents.
And in at least two cases, the documents show that Guantanamo officials were aware that they had innocent men in captivity and even put that in writing in their prison files, and yet it took months to return them to their home countries.
In an official statement to NPR and the New York Times, the Obama Administration defended their system for processing detainees.
"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 statement said. "Both Administrations have made the protection of American citizens the top priority, and we are concerned that the disclosure of these documents could be damaging to those efforts."
The statement said it was "unfortunate" NPR and the New York Times and other news organizations are publishing the classified Guantanamo documents. "We strongly condemn the leaking of this sensitive information," the statement said. It was signed by Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell and Ambassador Dan Fried, the State Department's special envoy in charge of negotiating the closure of the Guantanamo facility
SNIP
FYI.
Whoever is in charge of handling the docs should be executed.
Who’d thunk, NPR and the NY Times.
There is information and disinformation. Sort through all this garbage, ha! Don’t believe a word of any of this trash.
disclosing (no longer called ‘leaking’) classified information is so common at this point, it’s barely worth reporting
quality
once these people are out, we need a commission to look into ALL the leaking of classified materials and put ALL the people involved behind bars and queue them up for execution
No, hire them to get 0’s docs.
Thank you Kristinn for the ping.
OPINION:
Words cannot express what I feel about this.
The danger these leaks are creating are real and the person(s) who are responsible for the leaks should be prosecuted and if found guilty; death penalty.
They ARE the ENEMEDIA ... they just can't help themselves.
OK, tell me again why my tax dollars have to go to support NPR?
New York Times sues Wikileaks for unauthorized release of its business model: “We’re the ones stealing military secrets!”
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