The US held hundreds of inmates who were either totally innocent or low-risk for years and released dozens of “high-risk” Guantanamo inmates, according to leaked classified files.
The new leaks reveal that inmates were held without trial on the basis of often seriously flawed information, such as from mentally ill or unreliable co-detainees or statements from suspects who had been abused or tortured, the New York Times reported.
The Times was among a group of US and European media outlets that also included the Daily Telegraph, National Public Radio (NPR), El Pais, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and La Repubblica to receive 779 documents from the whistle-blowing Web site WikiLeaks.
At least 150 were innocent Afghans or Pakistanis, including drivers and farmers, who had been rounded up as part of frantic intelligence-gathering in war zones and were then detained for years due to mistaken identity or simply for being at the wrong place at the wrong time, the Daily Telegraph said.
The British daily said that overall, US military analysts considered only 220 of the people ever detained at Guantanamo to be dangerous extremists.
Another 380 of the suspects under former US president George W. Bush’s “war on terror” were deemed to be low-ranking foot soldiers who traveled to Afghanistan or were part of the Taliban, the Telegraph reported.
In dozens of cases, senior US commanders were said to have concluded that there was “no reason recorded for transfer” to the US naval base in southeastern Cuba.
Officials at Guantanamo were aware in at least two cases that they were holding innocent men behind bars and even acknowledged that in writing in their prison files, and yet it still took months for them to be returned to their countries, according to the public radio station NPR.
Meanwhile, about a third of the 600-some men who have been transferred to third countries were branded “high-risk” before being released or handed to other governments, the New York Times said.
Of the 172 prisoners who remain at Guantanamo, 130 have been rated as posing a “high-risk’ threat to the US and its allies.
In a troubling revelation for the US and its allies as they seek to back anti-government forces in Libya who are fighting to oust longtime strongman Muammar Qaddafi, the documents showed one of the rebels’ presumed trainers has closer ties to al-Qaeda than previously thought.
Abu Sufian bin Qumu was engaged in violent extremist activities for two decades, previously training at two al-Qaeda camps, fighting with the Taliban against the Soviet Union and the Northern Alliance and serving as al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s driver in Sudan, according to NPR.
After he served a six-year stint at Guantanamo, the US agreed to hand him over to Libyan authorities in 2007 following a request by Qaddafi, NPR said. Libyan authorities freed him last summer.
The Times said the files, which detail the background of each of the 779 people who have passed through the prison facility since 2002, revealed little about harsh interrogation tactics used at Guantanamo, including sleep deprivation and simulated drowning, that sparked widespread condemnation around the world.
According to the paper, the best-documented case of an abusive interrogation at Guantanamo was the coercive questioning in 2002 and 2003 of Mohammed Qahtani, a Saudi believed to have been a participant in the Sept. 11, 2001, plot. Qahtani was leashed like a dog, sexually humiliated and forced to urinate on himself, the paper said.
However, a number of other prisoners were said to have made false claims of torture.
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