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The Guantánamo Files

Classified Files Offer New Insights Into Detainees

By CHARLIE SAVAGE, WILLIAM GLABERSON and ANDREW W. LEHREN

Published: April 24, 2011

WASHINGTON — A trove of more than 700 classified military documents provides new and detailed accounts of the men who have done time at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, and offers new insight into the evidence against the 172 men still locked up there.

The American prison at Guantánamo Bay still holds 172 detainees, most rated “high risk.”

These articles are based on a huge trove of secret documents leaked last year to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks and made available to The New York Times by another source on the condition of anonymity.

Military intelligence officials, in assessments of detainees written between February 2002 and January 2009, evaluated their histories and provided glimpses of the tensions between captors and captives. What began as a jury-rigged experiment after the 2001 terrorist attacks now seems like an enduring American institution, and the leaked files show why, by laying bare the patchwork and contradictory evidence that in many cases would never have stood up in criminal court or a military tribunal.

The documents meticulously 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’ illnesses — hepatitis, gout, tuberculosis, depression. They note their serial interrogations, enumerating — even after six or more years of relentless questioning — remaining “areas of potential exploitation.” They describe inmates’ infractions — punching 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, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, reveal that most of the 172 remaining prisoners have been rated as a “high risk” of posing a threat to the United States 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 Cuba — about a third of the 600 already transferred to other countries — were also designated “high risk” before they were freed or passed to the custody of other governments.

The documents are largely silent about the use of the harsh interrogation tactics at Guantánamo — including sleep deprivation, shackling in stress positions and prolonged exposure to cold temperatures — that drew global condemnation. Several prisoners, though, are portrayed as making up false stories about being subjected to abuse.

The government’s basic allegations against many detainees have long been public, and have often been challenged by prisoners and their lawyers. But the dossiers, prepared under the Bush administration, provide a deeper look at the frightening, if flawed, intelligence that has persuaded the Obama administration, too, that the prison cannot readily be closed.

Prisoners who especially worried counterterrorism officials included some accused of being assassins for Al Qaeda, operatives for a canceled suicide mission and detainees who vowed to their interrogators that they would wreak revenge against America.

The military analysts’ files provide new details about the most infamous of their prisoners, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the planner of the Sept. 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 Pakistan’s president, according to the documents. But when the man, Majid Khan, got to the Pakistani mosque that he had been told Mr. 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. In May 2003, for example, Afghan forces captured Prisoner 1051, an Afghan named Sharbat, near the scene of a roadside bomb explosion, the documents show. He denied any involvement, saying he was a shepherd. Guantánamo debriefers and analysts agreed, citing his consistent story, his knowledge of herding animals and his ignorance of “simple military and political concepts,” according to his assessment. Yet a military tribunal declared him an “enemy combatant” anyway, and he was not sent home until 2006.

Obama administration officials condemned the publication of the classified documents, which were obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks last year but provided to The Times by another source. The officials pointed out that an administration task force set up in January 2009 reviewed the information in the prisoner assessments, and in some cases came to different conclusions. Thus, they said, the documents published by The Times may not represent the government’s current view of detainees at Guantánamo.

Among the findings in the files:

The 20th hijacker: The best-documented case of an abusive interrogation at Guantánamo was the coercive questioning, in late 2002 and early 2003, of Mohammed Qahtani. A Saudi believed to have been an intended participant in the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. 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.” But claims that he is said to have made about at least 16 other prisoners — mostly in April and May 2003 — are cited in their files without any caveat.

Threats against captors: While some detainees are described in the documents as “mostly compliant and rarely hostile to guard force and staff,” others spoke of violence. One detainee said “he would like to tell his friends in Iraq to find the interrogator, slice him up, and make a shwarma (a type of sandwich) out of him, with the interrogator’s head sticking out of the end of the shwarma.” Another “threatened to kill a U.S. service member by chopping off his head and hands when he gets out,” and informed a guard that “he will murder him and drink his blood for lunch. Detainee also stated he would fly planes into houses and prayed that President Bush would die.”

The Guantánamo Files

The role of foreign officials: The leaked documents show how many foreign countries sent intelligence officers to question Guantánamo detainees — among them China, Russia, Tajikistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Algeria and Tunisia. One such visit changed a detainee’s account: a Saudi prisoner initially told American interrogators he had traveled to Afghanistan to train at a Libyan-run terrorist training camp. But an analyst added: “Detainee changed his story to a less incriminating one after the Saudi Delegation came and spoke to the detainees.”

A Qaeda leader’s 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 Sept. 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 Guantánamo because of concerns over the stability of their country and its ability to monitor them.

Dubious information: Some assessments revealed the risk of relying on information supplied by people whose motives were murky. Hajji Jalil, then a 33-year-old Afghan, was captured in July 2003, after the Afghan chief of intelligence in Helmand Province said Mr. Jalil had taken an “active part” in an ambush that killed two American soldiers. But American officials, citing “fraudulent circumstances,” said later that the intelligence chief and others had participated in the ambush, and they had “targeted” Mr. Jalil “to provide cover for their own involvement.” He was sent home in March 2005.

A British agent: One report reveals that American officials discovered a detainee had been recruited by British and Canadian intelligence to work as an agent because of his “connections to members of various Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist groups.” But the report suggests that he had never shifted his militant loyalties. It says that the Central Intelligence Agency, after repeated interrogations of the detainee, concluded that he had “withheld important information” from the British and Canadians, and assessed him “to be a threat” to American and allied personnel in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has since been sent back to his country.

A journalist’s interrogation: The documents show that a major reason a Sudanese cameraman for Al Jazeera, Sami al-Hajj, was held at Guantánamo for six years was for questioning about the television network’s “training program, telecommunications equipment, and newsgathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo, and Afghanistan,” including contacts with terrorist groups. While Mr. Hajj insisted he was just a journalist, his file says he helped Islamic extremist groups courier money and obtain Stinger missiles and cites the United Arab Emirates’ 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 military’s 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.

Many of the dossiers include official close-up photographs of the detainees, providing images of hundreds of the prisoners, many of whom have not been seen publicly in years.

The files — classified “secret” and marked “noforn,” meaning they should not be shared with foreign governments — represent the fourth major collection of secret American documents that have become public over the past year; earlier releases included military incident reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and portions of an archive of some 250,000 diplomatic cables. Military prosecutors have accused an Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, of leaking the materials.

The Guantánamo assessments seem unlikely to end the long-running debate about America’s 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 government’s system of holding most without trials is justified.

The Guantánamo Files

These articles are based on a huge trove of secret documents leaked last year to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks and made available to The New York Times by another source on the condition of anonymity.

Much of the information in the documents is impossible to verify. The documents were prepared by intelligence and military officials operating at first in the haze of war, then, as the years passed, in a prison under international criticism. In some cases, judges have rejected the government’s allegations, because confessions were made during coercive interrogation or other sources were not credible.

In 2009, a task force of officials from the government’s national security agencies re-evaluated all 240 detainees then remaining at the prison. They vetted the military’s assessments against information held by other agencies, and dropped the “high/medium/low” risk ratings in favor 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 — using constant surveillance, forced removal from cells and other tools to exert control — and detainees who often fought back with the limited tools available to them: hunger strikes, threats of retribution and hoarded contraband ranging from a metal screw to leftover food.

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 Guantánamo 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, Guantánamo seems increasingly frozen in time, with detainees locked into their roles at the receding moment of their capture.

For example, an assessment of a former top Taliban official said he “appears to be resentful of being apprehended while he claimed he was working for the US and Coalition forces to find Mullah Omar,” a reference to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban chief who is in hiding.

But whatever the truth about the detainee’s role before his capture in 2002, it is receding into the past. So, presumably, is the value of whatever information he possesses. Still, his jailers have continued to press him for answers. His assessment of January 2008 — six years after he arrived in Cuba — contended that it was worthwhile to continue to interrogate him, in part because he might know about Mullah Omar’s “possible whereabouts.”

Charlie Savage reported from Washington, and William Glaberson and Andrew W. Lehren from New York. Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington, and Benjamin Weiser and Andrei Scheinkman from New York.

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The Guantánamo Files

Judging Detainees’ Risk, Often With Flawed Evidence

By SCOTT SHANE and BENJAMIN WEISER

Published: April 24, 2011

WASHINGTON — Said Mohammed Alam Shah, a 24-year-old Afghan who had lost a leg as a teenager, told interrogators at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that he had been conscripted by the Taliban as a driver before being detained in 2001. He had been caught, he said, as he tried to “rescue his younger brother from the Taliban.”

Military analysts believed him. Mr. Shah, who had been outfitted with a prosthetic leg by prison doctors, was “cooperative” and “has not expressed thoughts of violence or made threats toward the U.S. or its allies,” according to a sympathetic 2003 assessment. Its conclusion: “Detainee does not pose a future threat to the U.S. or U.S. interests.”

So in 2004 Mr. Shah was sent back to Afghanistan — where he promptly revealed himself to be Abdullah Mehsud, a Pakistan-born militant, and began plotting mayhem. He recorded jihadist videos, organized a Taliban force to fight American troops, planned an attack on Pakistan’s interior minister that killed 31 people, oversaw the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers, and finally detonated a suicide bomb in 2007 as the Pakistani Army closed in. His martyrdom was hailed in an audio message by none other than Osama bin Laden.

The Guantánamo analysts’ complete misreading of Abdullah Mehsud was included among hundreds of classified assessments of detainees at the prison in Cuba that were obtained by The New York Times. The unredacted assessments give the fullest public picture to date of the prisoners held at Guantánamo over the past nine years. They show that the United States has imprisoned hundreds of men for years without trial based on a difficult and strikingly subjective evaluation of who they were, what they had done in the past and what they might do in the future. The 704 assessment documents use the word “possibly” 387 times, “unknown” 188 times and “deceptive” 85 times.

Viewed with judges’ rulings on legal challenges by detainees, the documents reveal that the analysts sometimes ignored serious flaws in the evidence — for example, that the information came from other detainees whose mental illness made them unreliable. Some assessments quote witnesses who say they saw a detainee at a camp run by Al Qaeda but omit the witnesses’ record of falsehood or misidentification. They include detainees’ admissions without acknowledging other government documents that show the statements were later withdrawn, often attributed to abusive treatment or torture.

A Growing Wariness

Written between 2002 and 2009, the assessments reflect a growing wariness on the part of Guantánamo analysts. Early on, the reports are just a page or two and often sanguine in tone. By 2008, after scorching publicity about released detainees who joined Al Qaeda and the dwindling of the prison population to hard-core detainees, the assessments are decidedly more cautious.

For every case of an Abdullah Mehsud — someone wrongly judged a minimal threat — there are several instances in which prisoners rated “high risk” were released and have not engaged in wrongdoing. Murat Kurnaz, a German resident of Turkish ancestry, was judged in a 2006 assessment to be a member of Al Qaeda who fell into the most dangerous category: “high risk” and “likely to pose a threat to the U.S., its interests and allies.”

Nonetheless, American authorities, under pressure from both Germany and Turkey, overruled the analysts and sent Mr. Kurnaz home to Germany three months later. He did not join the global jihad but instead became a prominent critic of Guantánamo, writing a book and making countless media appearances to denounce the American prison.

Among the most revealing of the leaked documents is a 17-page guide for analysts, evidently prepared by military intelligence trainers, on how to gauge the danger posed by a detainee. It lists major clusters of detainees, including the so-called Dirty 30, who were the bodyguards of Mr. bin Laden, as well as the large group of accused Qaeda operatives captured with Abu Zubaydah, an important terrorist facilitator, at two guesthouses in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in 2002. It lists nine mosques associated with Al Qaeda, in Quebec, Milan, London, Yemen and Pakistan.

The guide shows how analysts seized upon the tiniest details as a potential litmus test for risk. If a prisoner had a Casio F91W watch, it might be an indication he had attended a Qaeda bomb-making course where such watches were handed out — though that model is sold around the world to this day. (Likewise, the assessment of a Yemeni prisoner suggests a dire use for his pocket calculator: “Calculators may be used for indirect fire calculations such as those required for artillery fire.”)

A prisoner caught without travel documents? It might mean he had been trained to discard them to make identification harder, the guide explains. A detainee who claimed to be a simple farmer or a cook, or in the honey business or searching for a wife? Those were common Taliban and Qaeda cover stories, the analysts were told.

And a classic Catch-22: “Refusal to cooperate,” the guide says, is a Qaeda resistance technique.

Yet the guide appears to be the product of years of experience at trying to turn bits of evidence of varying reliability into a conclusion. Notably, it cites as a cautionary tale the early misjudgment about Abdullah Mehsud, the Pakistani suicide bomber, who had claimed he was forced to join the Taliban. He was “an example,” the guide says, “of a detainee who successfully applied the conscription cover story as a means to secure his release from U.S. custody.”

Guantánamo emerges from the documents as a nest of informants, a closed world where detainees were the main source of allegations against one another and sudden recollections of having spotted a fellow prisoner at a Qaeda training camp could curry favor with interrogators. The assessments of many detainees amount to long lists of fellow prisoners’ claims about them.

Among the prison’s many informants, few outdid Yasim Basardah, a Yemeni whose statements are cited in the assessments of 30 detainees — even though at least three federal judges have questioned his credibility, citing his serious psychiatric problems. (In a curious twist, a judge ordered Mr. Basardah released last year, in part because she concluded that his ties to Al Qaeda had been effectively severed by his record of cooperation with American authorities. He was transferred to Spain.)

Or there is Abu Zubaydah, the Qaeda facilitator who was waterboarded while in the custody of the Central Intelligence Agency and whose interrogations are cited in the risk assessments of more than 100 prisoners. His lawyers have noted that his accusations against others have been systematically removed from government filings in court cases, an indication that officials no longer are certain of his reliability.

A few assessments acknowledge the hazards of rewarding detainees for information. “Detainee admitted that he provided information in a deliberately misleading manner in order to receive incentives from his debriefers,” said a report on Abdul Bukhary, a Saudi militant with a jihadist résumé stretching back to the Soviet-Afghan war. Mr. Bukhary told interrogators that “his memory was very bad,” to which the analysts added a skeptical note: “Feigning memory problems is a common counter-interrogation technique.”

Yet Mr. Bukhary’s observations are cited in the assessments of a dozen other prisoners without any caveat about his admitted deceptions or his claim of a poor memory. And though in July 2007 Mr. Bukhary was rated “high risk” and “likely” to pose a threat to American interests, he was sent home to Saudi Arabia and its rehabilitation program for militants just two months later.

The Release Lottery

The documents, originally obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks but provided to The Times by another source, portray Guantánamo as a lottery with the highest stakes for both the prisoners and their American captors. A critical factor was a detainee’s country of origin. Most European inmates were sent home, despite grave qualms on the analysts’ part. Saudis went home, even some of the most militant, to enter the rehabilitation program; some would graduate and then join Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Yemenis have generally stayed put, even those cleared for release, because of the chaos in their country. Even in clearly mistaken arrests, release could be slow.

One Afghan, Mohammed Nasim, was sent to Guantánamo in May 2003 under the belief that he was a notorious Taliban military commander of the same last name. By March 2004, analysts had realized their error: “It is assessed that the detainee is a poor farmer and his arrest was due to mistaken identity.” Yet, a review tribunal considered his case later that year as if he were the Taliban commander, and he was not sent home until April 2005 — two years after he arrived at the prison.

In some cases, the analysts showed a willingness to reconsider their judgments in light of new facts. An Afghan prisoner, Shawali Khan, was caught with what appeared to be deeply incriminating documents: a Qaeda training manual on assassination, surveillance and counterfeiting that even contained a plan to kidnap the American president, as well as a notebook from a Qaeda camp on the maintenance and use of the AK-47 and other weapons.

The problem was that the documents were all in Arabic, and six years after his capture, Mr. Khan had finally convinced interrogators that he could not read Arabic. That conclusion, analysts wrote, “lends more credence to detainee’s claim” that he had looted the material from possessions abandoned by Arab fighters who had fled Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.

A single footnote can call into question the entire case against a detainee: Abdul Haddi bin Hadiddi, a Tunisian who had spent time in Italy and was once arrested there for counterfeiting, was rated “high risk” and was believed to have received training from Al Qaeda. His assessment describes phone calls by the detainee, intercepted by Italian intelligence, with gunfire in the background.

But if the Italian dates are right, the reported calls were made after Mr. Hadiddi’s arrest. A footnote tries to sort it out: “If this was the detainee,” it says, then the reported dates of the calls must be wrong. “If this is not the detainee, it may indicate detainee’s claimed name is not his” — an astonishing acknowledgment about a man imprisoned since August 2002.

Judges Weigh In

Such frustrating case studies seem to beg for an independent evaluation of the evidence, some way of shedding light on the quality of the Guantánamo analysts’ work. As it happens, federal judges have heard nearly 60 cases brought by detainees challenging their imprisonment, and they have ruled in many of them that the government’s evidence was too thin or contradictory to justify holding the prisoner.

The 2008 assessment of Alla Ali bin Ali Ahmed, for instance, a Yemeni who denied that he had fought in Afghanistan, concluded that he was a “committed member of Al Qaeda” who posed a “high risk” to the United States. The Guantánamo Files

These articles are based on a huge trove of secret documents leaked last year to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks and made available to The New York Times by another source on the condition of anonymity.

But a federal judge who saw all the classified evidence in the case found that all four witnesses who claimed to have seen him in Afghanistan were unreliable. (The judge, Gladys Kessler, ordered Mr. Ahmed released, and he went home to Yemen in 2009.)

One witness, Judge Kessler wrote, was said by American military doctors to be suffering from “psychosis.” The assessment of that witness, a Yemeni named Musab al-Madoonee, described him as “in overall good health” and made no mention of his mental illness.

But in another case this month, another judge offered far more support for the Guantánamo analysts. Writing about another Yemeni detainee, Yasin Ismail, Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said he found the detainee’s account “phonier than a $4 bill” and rejected his challenge.

Judge Silberman showed sympathy for counterterrorism analysts who erred on the side of caution. In an ordinary criminal case, a judge may vote to overturn a conviction on evidentiary grounds even if he is virtually certain the defendant is guilty, Judge Silberman wrote. With a potential terrorist, he said, the stakes are different.

“When we are dealing with detainees,” Judge Silberman said, “candor obliges me to admit that one can not help but be conscious of the infinitely greater downside risk to our country, and its people, of an order releasing a detainee who is likely to return to terrorism.”

By the Pentagon’s count, as of Oct. 1, 2010, of the 598 detainees transferred from Guantánamo, 81 were “confirmed” and 69 “suspected” of engaging in terrorist or insurgent activities after their release. Accepting the highest Defense Department total, even the 25 percent rate would be lower than most estimates of recidivism rates for federal and state ex-convicts.

An Elusive Subject

But those numbers may be one reason Guantánamo officials have been loath to take a chance in the befuddling case of Detainee 257, known as Omar Hamzayavich Abdulayev, a 32-year-old Tajik. He arrived at Guantánamo when he was just 23, a month after the prison opened. Interrogators have questioned Mr. Abdulayev for nine years, intelligence officers from both Russia and Tajikistan have visited to talk to him and countless other prisoners have been asked what they know about him.

The most serious allegations came from a Kuwaiti prisoner who claimed that Mr. Abdulayev told him he was trained by Al Qaeda in poisons and explosives and had met top Qaeda operatives. But the Kuwaiti’s own assessment questioned his credibility, saying details of his account were “conflicting and vague.”

Then there is the documentary evidence: Mr. Abdulayev was caught with notebooks containing notes on explosives and lists of mujahedeen fighters. And an undated Qaeda training roster found in Afghanistan listed “Abdallah al-Uzbeki” among the trainees. An analyst, grasping for data on his elusive subject, wrote that “Abdallah” might be a variant of Abdallahyiv, a Tajik version of Abdulayev, and that al-Uzbeki “is an alias which can also be adopted by Tajiks and Afghans due to similar facial features and shared cultural beliefs and customs.”

Mr. Abdulayev appears to be an example of the most controversial category of Guantánamo detainees: the 47 whom the Obama administration has judged too dangerous for release but for whom it lacks the evidence necessary to hold a military tribunal.

Hence the haunting conclusion of his 2008 assessment: “Detainee’s identity remains uncertain.”

Scott Shane reported from Washington, and Benjamin Weiser from New York. Reporting was contributed by Charlie Savage from Washington, and William Glaberson, Andrew W. Lehren and Andrei Scheinkman from New York.