On April 24, 2011, WikiLeaks, The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and other outlets began publishing 765 classified Guantánamo documents produced by the Pentagon’s Joint Task Force Guantanamo between 2002 and 2009. The files indicated that more than 150 Afghans and Pakistanis—including farmers, drivers, and chefs—had been held for years without charges, while detainees ranged from 14-year-old Naqib Ullah to 89-year-old Mohammed Sadiq. Nearly 100 were diagnosed with depressive or psychotic illnesses. The assessments also showed officials retaining people for intelligence value even when records indicated they were not Taliban or al-Qaeda members.
The documents described reliance on allegations from a small number of detainees, including statements obtained from prisoners who had been tortured, and revealed that journalist Sami al-Hajj was held from 2002 to 2008 partly for questioning about Al Jazeera’s training, equipment, and reporting operations. The files recorded that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been waterboarded at least 183 times; the source notes that his nuclear-attack warning was made under duress and that no such attack followed Osama bin Laden’s 2011 death. The DOJ said the documents remained legally classified and barred Guantánamo lawyers from reading them, while the U.S. government condemned their publication as illegal. The files intensified scrutiny of indefinite detention, coercive interrogation, and the use of classified intelligence assessments.
