Innocent people interrogated for years on slimmest pretexts
Children, elderly and mentally ill among those wrongfully held
172 prisoners remain, some with no prospect of trial or release
Interactive guide to all 779 detainees
Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of Reprieve, discusses the 'extraordinarily thin' evidence used to hold prisoners and the 'nonsense' cooked up by a group of serial informers to get privileges
Link to this video
More than 700 leaked secret files on the Guantánamo detainees lay bare the inner workings of America's controversial prison camp in Cuba.
The US military dossiers, obtained by the New York Times and the Guardian, reveal how, alongside the so-called "worst of the worst", many prisoners were flown to the Guantánamo cages and held captive for years on the flimsiest grounds, or on the basis of lurid confessions extracted by maltreatment.
The 759 Guantánamo files, classified "secret", cover almost every inmate since the camp was opened in 2002. More than two years after President Obama ordered the closure of the prison, 172 are still held there.
The files depict a system often focused less on containing dangerous terrorists or enemy fighters, than on extracting intelligence. Among inmates who proved harmless were an 89-year-old Afghan villager, suffering from senile dementia, and a 14-year-old boy who had been an innocent kidnap victim.
The old man was transported to Cuba to interrogate him about "suspicious phone numbers" found in his compound. The 14-year-old was shipped out merely because of "his possible knowledge of Taliban...local leaders"
Comment: Are we supposed to believe that British and Canadian intelligence innocently received information from Hamlili without any awareness of his activities?
The fact is that a man involved with terrorist groups - labeled 'al-Qaida' by western intelligence for purposes of propaganda and psy-ops - was also working for western intelligence. How more obvious can it get?
Interestingly, according to the New York Times, the Guantánamo files were not obtained from WikiLeaks - which actually makes them more credible. WikiLeaks has a tendency to leak only items which happen to be convenient for Israeli interests, and to a lesser degree, US interests.