In the past few years, the picture has begun to come into focus as more journalists have joined in exploring who the detainees really are. Among the best pieces was a New York Times investigation published in June 2004 which concluded that most of the detainees seemed to be Taliban cannon fodder, and that officials had “exaggerated both the danger the detainees posed and the intelligence they have provided.” (The piece also cited the CIA’s conclusions from 2002.)


At National Journal, Corine Hegland was planning a profile of the white-shoe lawyers who have been representing many of the Guantanamo detainees. Hegland says she conducted interviews with about ten of the attorneys, and that at the end of the sessions each attorney would mention the same thing: “‘You know, my client wasn’t caught on the battlefield and he isn’t tied to al Qaeda.’ I was taking the train back from New York one night, and it hit me over the head, ‘Holy crap, what happens if the attorneys are telling me the truth?’”


Finding the answer wasn’t easy. After a Supreme Court ruling in 2004 giving Guantanamo prisoners access to federal courts, lawyers for the detainees filed petitions challenging their clients’ imprisonment. In about 130 of the cases — there are about 400 prisoners — a judge ordered the Pentagon to hand over its evidence.


Each prisoner’s file included a page or two of the military’s summary of evidence, often accompanied by supporting memos and a transcript of the hearing in which the military had reaffirmed that the prisoner was in fact an “enemy combatant.” The files were publicly available at federal courthouses. But they had been rarely explored in depth, and their contents were never compiled systematically, which is exactly what Hegland set about doing.


After two months of sifting the information, Hegland had her answer. “The data was really clear,” she says. “It was mind-boggling.” It showed that most of the detainees hadn’t been caught “on the battlefield” but rather mostly in Pakistan; fewer than half were accused of fighting against the U.S., and there was scant evidence to confirm that they were even combatants. In other words, most of the detainees probably were entirely innocent.


Just a few days after Hegland published a three-part series on her findings in early February, a law professor at Seton Hall University, Mark Denbeaux, and his son, Joshua Denbeaux, who together have represented Guantanamo detainees, published a study that also used the Defense Department’s own data, though a somewhat different set. After stripping out the prisoners’ names, along with the supporting memos and transcripts, the Pentagon had publicly released the summary of evidence against every Guantanamo prisoner. Using that larger but less detailed data set, the Denbeaux’s findings echoed Hegland’s: Only 8 percent of detainees at Guantanamo were labeled by the Defense Department as “al Qaeda fighters,” they found, and just 11 percent had been captured “on the battlefield” by coalition forces.


Before Hegland published her stories, she presented her conclusions to Pentagon officials, who continued to deny that many at Guantanamo could be there by mistake. Like Gutman, Hegland concluded that the officials weren’t really lying. Instead, they didn’t know, and didn’t want to know, the truth. “I don’t think anybody at DoD had looked at actual data and the patterns,” she says. “They kept asking these guys about 9/11, every single one.”


It’s not only the Department of Defense that evinces a continued lack of interest in the detainees. President Bush has repeatedly said that he’d like to close Guantanamo but that it’s not easy since, as he put it in a June 2006 press conference, “These people have been picked up off the battlefield, and they’re very dangerous.” No reporter present challenged the statement.

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