WASHINGTON — U.S. military intelligence assessing the threat of nearly 800 men held at the Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba used, in many cases, information from a small group of captives whose accounts now appear to be questionable, according to a McClatchy Newspapers analysis of a trove of secret documents made public by WikiLeaks.
The allegations and observations of just eight detainees were used to help build cases against about 255 men at Guantanamo — roughly a third of all who passed through the prison. Yet the statements of some of the eight were later questioned by Guantanamo analysts, and the others were subjected to interrogation tactics that defense attorneys say amounted to torture and compromised the veracity of their information.
Concerns about the quality of the “facts” from the eight men goes to the heart of Guantanamo’s “mosaic” approach of piecing together detainees’ involvement with insurgent or terrorist groups that usually did not depend on one slam- dunk piece of evidence. Rather, intelligence analysts combined an array of details such as the items in detainees’ pants pockets at capture and whether they had confessed to interrogators — American or otherwise.
More than two-thirds of the men and boys at Guantanamo were not captured by U.S. forces. So analysts were often left to weave together the stories told by detainees, the context of where and how they were initially scooped up, the information passed on by interrogators at other U.S. detention sites and, crucially, the statements of fellow detainees at Guantanamo.
At Guantanamo, the captives were aware that some prisoners were providing a pipeline of information to interrogators — either to justify their continued detention or for use in potential prosecutions.
“I heard there was another detainee talking about me,” former detainee Feroz Abassi, a Briton, said in a recent interview. “I thought, let them talk. They’re only going to corroborate my story.”
After being held at Guantanamo for more than three years, Abassi was released in a diplomatic deal in January 2005 at age 25. He now works as a caseworker at the London-based detainee activist group Cageprisoners.
Abassi said it became apparent that some informants were “straying away from the truth, trying to save themselves. They crack, and they think it helps them to point fingers. But they only dig a hole for themselves.”
That appears to have been the case for Mohammed Basardah, a self-described one-time jihadist whose information was used in assessments for at least 131 detainees. In some instances, he accused fellow detainees of training at militant camps or taking part in the fighting in Afghanistan against the U.S. and its allies in late 2001.
Other times, intelligence analysts inserted a sliver of a Ba sardah quote about the guilt of everyone caught at Tora Bora — the mountain region where Osama bin Laden and members of his inner circle fled following the 2001 terrorist attacks — as a sort of blanket truism.
The Yemeni’s statement was included despite worries highlighted in a 2008 Guantanamo intelligence assessment that his “firsthand knowledge in reporting remains in question.”
At the Pentagon, Army Lt. Col. Tanya Bradsher said the military would not be commenting on McClatchy Newspapers’ findings because “the documents disclosed by WikiLeaks are the stolen property of the U.S. government.”
Any lingering doubts about the eight men and the quality of their statements were rarely listed when their information appeared in the case files of other detainees. In a 2009 opinion ordering the Pentagon to release detainee Saeed Mohammed Saleh Hatim, U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina pointed out that Basardah’s allegations about Hatim were collected several years after interrogators knew there were problems.
While the government maintained that Basardah provided interrogators with “accurate, reliable information,” Urbina said that Basardah had been flagged as early as May 2002 by a Guantanamo interrogator who did not recommend using him for further intelligence gathering “due in part to mental and emotional problems (and) limited knowledgeability.”
For Human Rights Watch senior counterterror counsel Andrea Prasow, who earlier in her career defended several Guantanamo captives, the military’s reliance on such prison camp snitches vindicates the role of federal judges in analyzing the Pentagon’s patchwork of cases.
“But for habeas (corpus),” she said Monday, “we’d never have known that Basardah was a liar.”
