Detention deficit: gitmo files tell all.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Citings - Guantanamo Bay Naval Base - Brief article

AN APRIL document release from WikiLeaks shed new fight on how people end up in the U.S. government's prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and why they stay there.

Some of the documents suggest that a culture of snitching arose within the prison community, with inmates offering damning information about other prisoners. The New Yorker noted that many detainees were held not because there was good reason to think they were dangerous but merely because the government thought they knew things the U.S. wanted to know.

An Al Jazeera journalist, sami al-Hajj, was held for six years. The reason, according to his file, was to extract information on "the al-Jazeera News Network's training program, telecommunications equipment, and newsgathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo, and Afghanistan" supposedly because that network had once obtained a Bin Laden video. Although...