Reports: Dozens were jailed at Guantanamo for no reason

Apr 25, 2011, 13:20 GMT

Madrid/Washington - At least one in five inmates at the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were jailed arbitrarily and with little evidence that they were enemy combatants, Spain's El Pais and other newspapers reported Monday, quoting WikiLeaks.

The Spanish daily quoted documents published by the internet whistleblower containing secret US military files on 759 of the 779 inmates who were kept at Guantanamo. About 170 of them are still being held at the prison camp.

Eighty-three of the prisoners were deemed not to represent any security risk for the United States, while 77 were 'unlikely' to do so, the files show.

At least 20 per cent of the inmates were jailed without any obvious justification.

They included an 89-year-old senile man; a father who had gone to look for his son among the Taliban; a merchant who travelled without identity documents, and a hitch-hiker who was going to buy medicines.

Some of the inmates were incarcerated because one of their relatives had been linked with Islamic fundamentalists, or because they lived in a village which had suffered Taliban attacks, or because they had travelled on routes used by suspected terrorists.

Even the US authorities themselves were unable to explain the reasons for imprisoning some of the inmates. Nevertheless, such people could be kept at the prison camp for as long as nine years.

The main reason for jailing the Guantanamo inmates was trying to obtain information from them, according to El Pais.

However, only 22 per cent of the inmates were deemed to have a high informative value for the US intelligence services.

Countries ranging from Russia to Saudi Arabia sent intelligence officers to question detainees, according to reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post based on leaked documents from WikiLeaks.

The other countries included China, Tajikistan, Yemen, Jordan, Kuwait, Algeria and Tunisia.

The leaks, based on detainee assessments written by the Department of Defence between 2002 and early 2009, also described how some inmates of the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay threatened to kill their interrogators.

The US government has condemned the publication of such 'sensitive information' and has said some of the information does not represent the government's 'current view' of the detainees.

In a statement released to the New York Times and National Public Radio, the Pentagon and the US State Department noted that both the administrations of President Barack Obama and his predecessor George W Bush 'have made every effort to act with the utmost care and diligence in transferring detainees from Guantanamo.'

Obama had pledged to close down the prison camp and transfer detainees for prosecution to the US civilian court system, but has since decided not to. More than 600 detainees have been transferred to other countries since the prison opened in 2002.

The New York Times noted that the secret documents also revealed that most of the remaining prisoners are rated as 'high risk' to the United States and its allies, but that fact has been well established in public comments by government officials.

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