Wikileaks revelations about Gitmo bad news for Obama

A U.S. Army guard stands in a corridor of cells in Camp Five, a detention facility at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in this file picture taken September 4, 2007.

JOE SKIPPER/REUTERS

By Michelle Shephard National Security Reporter

In May 2009, when U.S. President Barack Obama was defending his decision to close Guantanamo’s prison, he vowed to review the intelligence files of every remaining detainee.

“We’re cleaning up something that is, quite simply, a mess — a misguided experiment,” he said in a speech at Washington’s National Archive.

Now that messy experiment is public for the world to see.

Thousands of classified military documents concerning more than 700 detainees once held in Guantanamo Bay are being released this week through Wikileaks and three media outlets that independently acquired the files.

The timing couldn’t be worse for the Obama administration.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced earlier this month that the alleged 9/11 conspirators will be tried before a Guantanamo military commission, thereby holding the most important terrorism trials of the decade in the place Obama had vowed to shut to regain the “moral high ground.”

Among the revelations of the 758 detainees are the details of the wrongfully imprisoned, including a 14-year-old who had been kidnapped by the Taliban, a farmer held for two years as a victim of mistaken identity and an 89-year-old Afghani who suffered from dementia.

“I would hope that these documents persuaded some people to look at the story of Guantanamo again, and to say either ‘Oh I didn’t know, I’d forgotten, or this looks terrible,’ ” said Andy Worthington, author of The Guantanamo Files and who consulted with Wikileaks on the release of the documents.

But the botched attempt to sort the innocent from what Bush administration officials called the “worst of the worst,” also included a few cases where detainees deemed to pose little threat proved deadly.

According to the New York Times, a 2003 assessment shows that interrogators believed Abdullah Mehsud (who had given a fake name) “does not pose a future threat to the U.S. or U.S. interests.” He was returned to Afghanistan where he began a three-year reign of terror that ended in a suicide bombing.

Given the breadth of information disclosed, it’s likely the documents will prove to be a Rorschach test — those who believe only terrorists were held will find assessments to back their view, as will those who decry the detention of the Afghan goat herders.

Although there was no new information in the assessment of Toronto-born detainee Omar Khadr, there were Canadian connections in the files regarding other detainees.

Included in a document called the “Matrix of Threat Indicators For Enemy Combatants” — purportedly given to interrogators as a guide — is Montreal’s Al Sunnah al Nabawiah mosque on a list of nine Islamic Centres worldwide where the Pentagon believed “Al Qaeda members were recruited, facilitated or trained.”

Detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi once attended the mosque, allegedly meeting Ahmed Ressam, the so-called Millennium Bomber. Convicted of a foiled plot to blow up Los Angeles airport on New Years Eve 1999, Ressam is in a Seattle prison appealing his sentence. Slahi remains in Gitmo.

American interrogators also suspected an Algerian detainee accused of bombing two Christian churches and hotel in Pakistan as working simultaneously for British and Canadian intelligence.

The documents, which were written between 2002 and 2008 are what is known as detainee assessment briefs, or DABs, and were conducted to assess the potential risk posed by the captives.

Although the Bush-era intelligence assessments were done under the previous administration, taken together they highlight the Gitmo headaches for the current one.

The two most pressing issues facing the Obama administration is prosecuting detainees when faced with illegally obtained evidence or unreliable witnesses, and determining the fate of the prisoners who will not be tried.

One Yemeni detainee, who has since been released, reportedly gave information concerning 135 detainees. The credibility of others were questioned by the interrogators themselves.

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