Wikileaks has farmed out new files to several newspapers around the globe relating to the US prison at Guantanamo.
WikiLeaks is responsible for more newsworthy scoops over the last year than all media outlets combined: it’s not even a close call. And if Bradley Manning is the leaker, he has done more than any other human being in our lifetime to bring about transparency and shine a light on what military and government power is doing.[...]
The idea of trusting the government to imprison people for life based on secret, untested evidence never reviewed by a court should repel any decent or minimally rational person, but [...]vnewly released files demonstrate how warped is this indefinite detention policy specifically.
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The NYT describes the case of Omar Hamzayavich Abdulayev – placed in Guantanamo in 2002 when he was 23 (he’s now 32) and one of the detainees just ordered indefinitely detained by Obama. The newly released files reveal what the NYT calls “the haunting conclusion of his 2008 assessment: ‘Detainee’s identity remains uncertain’.” In other words, the person who has been in Guantanamo for 9 years – most of his adult life – and whom Obama just ordered detained indefinitely with no charges, very well may not even be the person we think he is.
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, alleged 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 order DNA tests, tether Taliban suspects to polygraphs, string together tidbits in ways that seemed to defy common sense.
Because Bush tortured some of the [Guantanamo] detainees, [...] Obama [claims he is] incapable of prosecuting them [since evidence obtained under torture is not admissible], yet because many of those detainees are Terrorists and/or Too Dangerous to Release (even though they can't be convicted of anything), he has no real choice but to keep imprisoning them without charges.[...]
[A]t least people who are prosecuted using torture-obtained evidence have the opportunity to defend themselves in court and to call into question the reliability of that evidence. [...] Anyone who supports indefinite detention on this ground is doing something much worse than justifying the use of torture-obtained evidence to prosecute someone: they're justifying imprisonment without trials based on evidence they know -- and which they admit -- was obtained by torture.
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