WikiLeaks Documents Show Failures of Intelligence Gathering Effort at Gitmo
WikiLeaks Documents Show Failures of Intelligence Gathering Effort at
Gitmo
Roughly a quarter of detainees
had no recorded affiliation with any terror organization at all, 63% refused to
provide any incriminating evidence, and the quality of the intelligence
gathered has yet to yield any fruitful results.
The US established the military
prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba over 14 years ago citing the need to detain and
interrogate terror suspects captured during the US-led international "war
on terror."
That effort has failed based on
recent research based on WikiLeaks documents covering the interrogations and
subsequent intelligence gathered at the US torture facility. Researcher Emanuel
Deutschmann of the Bremen International Graduate School, ran an empirical
analysis tracking intelligence patterns and the likelihood that the intelligence
was correct.
His findings were astonishing.
Although 85% of Guantanamo detainees were explicitly brought to Cuba “to
provide information,” almost two thirds did not provide any information about
fellow detainees at all. This suggests that either the detainees did not have
the information that US officials had hoped for or that US torture methods are
an “inefficient” method for gathering intelligence.
Despite the ineffectiveness of
the torture regime, the practices continued in full with very little oversight
or questioning of their efficacy due to a lack of public information. That
changed in 2010 when Bradley Manning released Gitmo memorandums on 765
detainees to Wikileaks.
The memorandums contained a
thorough data set including factors like age, nationality, health status,
supposed affiliations with terrorist organizations, intelligence value,
disobedient behavior in addition to any incriminating statements made by
detainees.
Interestingly, for nearly a
quarter of the detainees, there was no recorded affiliation with a known
terrorist organization in their file begging the question why they were there
in the first place. Many others were captured fleeing US-led strikes in
Afghanistan and Iraq calling into question the accuracy of enemy combatant
designations in the wake of chaos and the fog of war.
In total, 63% of detainees did
not incriminate themselves or any others despite the application of indefinite
detention and near constant torture. Nearly a quarter of detainees did
implicate a small number of other detainees as being involved in a terror
organization and a smaller number implicated anybody and everybody at the
facility in what is seen as an attempt to just tell their torturers what they
wanted to hear.
With data analytics further
establishing that torture and crimes against humanity lack any intelligence
gathering value, the question remains whether the 2016 presidential candidates
will pay attention to the researchers or continue to play towards voters darker
sentiments.