The Guantánamo files: Tale of two prisons

The Guantánamo files: Tale of two prisons

Guantánamo embodies the failure of the Afghan war, which began amid bombast in 2001, but which collapsed long ago

Editorial, The Guardian, Tuesday 26 April 2011

As a metaphor for everything that has gone wrong with the Afghan war, the story of two prisons is hard to beat. In one prison, they can't get the remaining inmates out. In the other, they can't keep them in. Either way, the military coalition has been left looking like a fool.

In southern Afghanistan yesterday morning, 475 prisoners, almost all said to be Taliban insurgents, escaped through a tunnel that seems to have been dug under the eyes of their captors. And just as the Taliban were digging their way out, the Guardian and the New York Times were putting online leaked documents describing the management of inmates in that other, more famous prison in Guantánamo Bay. President Obama was elected on a promise to close the latter within a year of taking office. Instead he has abandoned the task with 172 inmates still inside. Some of these, as the Guantánamo files show, are seriously unpleasant and dangerous but others are lesser figures who have become lost in the system after years of abuse and misinformation made them impossible to prosecute or simply homeless, like the Chinese Uighur Muslims, who have nowhere to go.

Either way, Guantánamo embodies the failure of America and Britain's Afghan war, which began amid bombast in 2001, but which collapsed long ago into confusion. The thing that stands out from the newly published Guantánamo files is not the disgraceful self-exempted off-shoring of the rule of law, or even the torture and sustained abuse of inmates – grotesque though these things are, we have long known about them – but the random ineffectiveness of the system. The defence put forward by the people who set Guantánamo up – it was an efficient way of keeping the world safe – is shown to be wrong.

Click through the records of the 779 prisoners who have passed through the Guantánamo system, on the Guardian's interactive guide, and you find an unpredictable mix of the evil, the criminal and the accidental. Some of them fought the west, some of them are doing so again and indeed some may be among the prisoners who escaped yesterday in Kandahar. But as we report today, Guantánamo turned out to be a bad way of gathering intelligence and even worse as a system of justice. The files show that a large amount of the information supposedly collected from prisoners has in fact come from a handful of informants among the inmates. Some of the things they have passed on may be true. Other things are surely false. After nine years of operation, it is impossible to know which.

Guantánamo was and still is a dumping ground for all sorts of people, not (as America once claimed) the distillation of its most extreme enemies. Among the leaked files is a guide for interrogators, telling them what to look out for in order to identify terrorists. It reveals a desperate lack of precision, and a system in which it was almost impossible for inmates to convince anyone of their innocence. One supposed sign of terrorist links was a particular kind of Casio watch. Another was the fact that someone had gone to Afghanistan after 2001. Yet among the original detainees was a 14-year-old boy and an 89-year-old man, neither of whom had anything to do with the Taliban. Imprisoned beyond the rule of law, as enemy combatants, they found themselves part of a cruel and surreal system which sustained itself through its own illegitimacy.

As President Obama has found, once someone has entered the Guantánamo system it has proved very difficult to get them out. The nature of their imprisonment and questioning makes prosecution in a federal court all but impossible. The innocent or insignificant were trapped, or only gradually released. The more that is revealed about Guantánamo, the worse it looks as a way of responding to terrorism. It was a symbol of vengeance, not a system of justice. Read the files and find out why.