Many Detainees Knew Little Or Nothing

Twelfth of 25 excerpts from The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer:

As the first anniversary of September 11 approached and the White House braced for what was considered to be the very real threat of a second major attack on America, frustration practically radiated from the military's prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It had been three-quarters of a year since the first orange jumpsuit-clad detainees had been unloaded from the war zone in Afghanistan, and the U.S. government had learned almost nothing of importance. In some cases, the government had learned literally nothing at all. When White House staff members had asked the see the prisoners' files, they had been astounded to discover that for some detainees, there were no details of any sort. Not even a name. There was just an assigned prisoner number and a silently uncooperative detainee. . . .

The CIA, concerned by the paucity of valuable information emanating from the island, in the late summer of 2002 dispatched a senior intelligence analyst, who was fluent in Arabic and an expert on Islamic extremism, to find out what the problem was. . . . After spending several hours with each of about two dozen Arabic-speaking detainees, chosen in a random sampling, he concluded that an estimated one-third of the camp's population of more than 600 captives at the time, meaning more than 200 individuals, had no connection to terrorism whatsoever. If the intelligence haul was meager, his findings suggested, one reason was that many of the detainees knew little or nothing.

Copyright 2008 by Jane Mayer. All Rights Reserved