New Guantánamo Papers Released

Flickr Image by The National Guard

A Massive Egg on the Face of the United States

On April 24, 2011, hundreds of classified documents regarding the military prison camp maintained by the U.S. Government at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were released to The New York Times and National Public Radio (NPR). The documents had originally been turned over to WikiLeaks, but both the Times and NPR maintain that WikiLeaks was not their source. Among the documents distributed were the profiles of several prominent inmates of the facility, reports regarding life at the prison, and a “threat matrix” that clarifies how to classify different inmates based upon their individual risk levels. The release of these documents turned out to be a massive embarrassment to the United States and should have been a wake-up call, adding to the growing list of arguments to expedite the termination of the institution. This debate will likely intensify with the gunning down of Osama bin Laden on May 2.

The “threat matrix” in particular exemplifies how unrefined the detainment process has been at the infamous facility. This two-page document outlines whether an inmate should be indefinitely held, transferred somewhere else, or be released, according to his “risk” level and any information the detainee was thought to possess. The document also recommends how to categorize a prisoner into a “risk” level, incorporating vague language such as “he may have been” or “he does not appear,” often making evaluations a subjective endeavor.1 With such an overly simplistic and poorly defined method like the “threat matrix” to characterize the inmates, the final classification of prisoners was largely left to the discretion of the prison guards and their personal, often rudimentary beliefs about the detainees. Even if a prisoner was classified as “low risk,” yet was determined to have high intelligence value, the matrix would recommend that he should remain in captivity at Guantánamo.

Read more

Photo Credit