"Said Mohammed Alam Shah, a 24-year-old Afghan who had lost a leg as a teenager, told interrogators at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that he had been conscripted by the Taliban as a driver before being detained in 2001. He had been caught, he said, as he tried to 'rescue his younger brother from the Taliban.'
"These articles are based on a huge trove of secret documents leaked last year to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks and made available to The New York Times by another source on the condition of anonymity.
"Military analysts believed him. Mr. Shah, who had been outfitted with a prosthetic leg by prison doctors, was 'cooperative' and 'has not expressed thoughts of violence or made threats toward the U.S. or its allies,' according to a sympathetic 2003 assessment. Its conclusion:
'Detainee does not pose a future threat to the U.S. or U.S. interests.'
"So in 2004 Mr. Shah was sent back to Afghanistan — where he promptly revealed himself to be Abdullah Mehsud, a Pakistan-born militant, and began plotting mayhem. He recorded jihadist videos, organized a Taliban force to fight American troops, planned an attack on Pakistan’s interior minister that killed 31 people, oversaw the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers, and finally detonated a suicide bomb in 2007 as the Pakistani Army closed in. His martyrdom was hailed in an audio message by none other than Osama bin Laden."
[Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish points out that this happened under the Bush administration, and we never heard a peep from the press (I certainly don't remember seeing it before.) What if it happened today under Obama, Sullivan wonders.]
"The Guantánamo analysts’ complete misreading of Abdullah Mehsud was included among hundreds of classified assessments of detainees at the prison in Cuba that were obtained by The New York Times. The unredacted assessments give the fullest public picture to date of the prisoners held at Guantánamo over the past nine years. They show that the United States has imprisoned hundreds of men for years without trial based on a difficult and strikingly subjective evaluation of who they were, what they had done in the past and what they might do in the future. The 704 assessment documents use the word 'possibly' 387 times, 'unknown' 188 times and 'deceptive' 85 times."
[There's much more about the flawed analysis of Guantanamo detainees (only about 20 of those currently held have given evidence not obtained under torture that might hold up in court; 150 are being held, many for up to ten years, and though there is no credible evidence against them, their detention under "enhanced interrogation techniques" may have radicalized them to the point where they would be dangerous to the U.S. if now released.) Click the link.]
"Among the most revealing of the leaked documents is a 17-page guide for analysts, evidently prepared by military intelligence trainers, on how to gauge the danger posed by a detainee....
"The guide shows how analysts seized upon the tiniest details as a potential litmus test for risk. If a prisoner had a Casio F91W watch, it might be an indication he had attended a Qaeda bomb-making course where such watches were handed out — though that model is sold around the world to this day. (Likewise, the assessment of a Yemeni prisoner suggests a dire use for his pocket calculator: 'Calculators may be used for indirect fire calculations such as those required for artillery fire.')
"A prisoner caught without travel documents? It might mean he had been trained to discard them to make identification harder, the guide explains. A detainee who claimed to be a simple farmer or a cook, or in the honey business or searching for a wife? Those were common Taliban and Qaeda cover stories, the analysts were told.
"And a classic Catch-22: 'Refusal to cooperate,' the guide says, is a Qaeda resistance technique."
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