One Pakistani man and his brother were arrested and turned over to US forces, then transferred to Guantanamo, despite the fact that the two had been working on a book to combat Islamic extremism, in the course of which they had come into contact with several Islamists and come to the notice of the Pakistani authorities.
According to his DAB, Abdul Badr Mannan "in his writings, has also been extremely critical of the Pakistani intelligence service and their overt connections to extremism and Al Qaida. Detainee and his brother may have been arrested on that pretence and turned over to US authorities, who were misled as to the detainee's affiliations."
A Muslim convert of British descent, Jamal al-Harith, was arrested by the Taliban as a suspected British spy, then seized by US forces and "beaten, stripped naked and interrogated." He was interrogated about 80 times by US and British security officials, according to his own account. His DAB quotes Guantanamo Commander Michael Dunlavey making the assessment in September 2002 "that detainee was not affiliated with Al Qaida or a Taliban leader." Nonetheless, he remained in the prison another year.
One of the documents released by WikiLeaks is a 17-page "JTF-GTMO matrix of threat indicators," which gives guidance to interrogators about what criteria to use in assessing the potential dangers posed by a detainee. These include membership in any of nine mosques in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Europe; possession of a Casio F91W watch (widely available for purchase worldwide); travel to Afghanistan any time after September 11, 2001, regardless of the reason; connections, however distant, to any of several dozen purported "terrorist" organizations including, remarkably, the main Pakistani intelligence agency ISI.
Raw material in the DABs includes testimony from prisoners about ISI officers meeting with Taliban leaders, providing funds and weapons for the Taliban, and giving advice on military tactics and coordination to both Taliban and Al Qaeda between 2002 and 2008. Some elements of the ISI allegedly provided "sniper training and the use of remote control improvised explosive devices."
At the same time, the documents confirm that interrogators from dozens of foreign intelligence agencies traveled to Guantanamo to help interrogate prisoners of their nationality. Besides nearly all the countries of Western Europe, as well as Canada and Australia, this included Saudi Arabia, China, Tunisia, Morocco, Russia, Tajikistan, Jordan, Algeria, Yemen and Kuwait--all of them known to practice torture at home, making them comfortable operating at Guantanamo. It also included officers of the Pakistani ISI, the same agency described as a terrorist group in the threat matrix document.
One of the most sinister detentions was the six years of imprisonment for an Al Jazeera cameraman, Sami al-Hajj, arrested in Pakistan and shipped to Guantanamo after 9/11. His DAB declares that one reason for his detention was "to provide information on"the Al Jazeera news network's training program, 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's British attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, said that the Guantanamo interrogations focused almost exclusively on the television network's operations, and al-Hajj was never questioned about his own supposed role in Al Qaeda or the Taliban. Stafford Smith told the press that he believed the US wanted to recruit al-Hajj as an informer at the network. He was released in May 2008 and has returned to work at Al Jazeera.
According to the summary posted by WikiLeaks, "the entire edifice constructed by the government is fundamentally unsound, and that what the Guantà ¡namo Files reveal, primarily, is that only a few dozen prisoners are genuinely accused of involvement in terrorism."
The web site wrote that the documents did not confirm the "scaremongering rhetoric" of the US government, but "the opposite: the anatomy of a colossal crime perpetrated by the US government on 779 prisoners who, for the most part, are not and never have been the terrorists the government would like us to believe they are."
WikiLeaks made the material available to news organizations in the United States, Britain, France, Spain and Germany, as it has in the past. It excluded, however, the New York Times and the British Guardian, which were once its major outlets, because of the overt editorial hostility of both publications.
In the latest release, the Times reported that it had obtained the Guantanamo DABs independently, and not from WikiLeaks, and made them available to the Guardian and National Public Radio in the United States.
The Times did not identify its source, but since the DABs are all secret US intelligence documents marked "NOFORN" -- i.e., not for distribution to any foreign government or intelligence service -- it appears likely that the Times received its own version of the DABs from the US government itself.
The presentation in the Times is also markedly different from that which appears in the international press. Newspapers overseas have emphasized the arbitrary, even random character of the detentions, and the innocence of the vast majority of detainees. The Times gave equal play to Pentagon claims that about one quarter of those released from Guantanamo have "returned" to terrorism -- although this figure includes prisoners who after their release became public political opponents of US torture and military aggression, not terrorists.
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