More than 700 classified military files, part of a massive cache of secret documents leaked to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, were made available to select US and European media outlets and made public on Sunday.
The report concerns hundreds of classified documents concerning detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the documents come from the Pentagon’s Joint Task Force at Guantanamo.
The trove of classified files showed US officials struggling with often flawed evidence and confused about the guilt or innocence of detainees held at the prison at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Unhappy Obama administration officials admitted the disclosure could hurt US security and condemned the release.
Hundreds of inmates who turned out to have no serious terror links were held without trial, based on vague or inaccurate information, including accounts from unreliable fellow detainees or statements from men who had been abused or tortured, the New York Times quoted the documents as saying.
One poor Afghan farmer with no ties to militants was held for two years without trial in a case of mistaken identity, the documents showed. But US authorities in 2004 decided to release Abdullah Mehsud, a Taleban extremist who duped his interrogators into believing he had been conscripted by the insurgents as a driver, according to a report.
“Detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests,” said a 2003 document, quoted by the Times.
Mehsud, who gave a false name to his American interrogators, was sent back to Afghanistan where he organized a Taleban unit to assault US troops, planned an attack on Pakistan’s Interior Ministry that claimed 31 lives, oversaw the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers and set off a suicide bomb in 2007 in Pakistan.
The government said in a statement the Obama and Bush administrations had “made every effort to act with the utmost care and diligence in transferring detainees from Guantanamo.”
The New York Times was among a group of US and European media outlets that obtained the 779 secret documents, including The Washington Post, National Public Radio, The Daily Telegraph, El Pais, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and La Repubblica.
