Guantánamo Files: Answers to Readers’ Questions

Reporters and editors of The New York Times are answering readers’ questions about “The Guantánamo Files,” The Times’s coverage of a trove of more than 700 classified files, obtained last year by the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks, about past and present detainees at the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The documents were made available to The Times by another source on the condition of anonymity.

Questions may be submitted by e-mail to askthetimes@nytimes.com.

The Geneva Conventions

Q. Did any of the files show the military engaging in actions that violate the Geneva conventions? Was anyone harmed at the expense of the new information?

A. The documents are assessments of each detainee, and they say almost nothing about the treatment of detainees, good or bad. They are totally focused on intelligence about what the detainees had allegedly done in the past and what danger they might pose if released. There is very little about the harsh treatment of some detainees early in the prison’s history, or the implications of that treatment for the veracity of what they told interrogators at the time.

Hardened Fighters

Q. How many of the detainees have histories going back to the Soviet-Afghan war?

A. The majority of the detainees who were brought to Guantánamo are far too young to have fought the Soviets in the 1980s. Many of the non-Afghan Arabs who were swept up along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in late 2001 were in their 20s and had gone there from their home countries — most often Saudi Arabia or Yemen — within the past couple of years. However, there are also a handful of veteran jihadists with long and storied histories — not just the Afghan-Soviet war in the 1980s, but also war zones like Bosnia and Chechnya.

Purpose of the Files

Q. What use did the United States put all this information to, or was it just archived somewhere?

A.These detainee assessments were prepared between 2002 and 2009 to summarize what the government knew about each detainee. They were an important part of the decision-making concerning which detainees could be sent home or transferred to other countries — 600 of 779 to date — and which should be kept at Guantanamo — 172 are still there. The Obama administration has since performed new reviews of each of the remaining detainees, but those new documents remain secret.

Why Not Call It Torture?

Q. The article today says the documents "are largely silent about the use of the harsh interrogation tactics at Guantánamo." Why does The New York Times continue to refuse to call torture by its name?

A. Some of the interrogation methods may fit a legal or common-sense definition of torture. Others may not. To refer to the whole range of practices as "torture" would be simply polemical.

The Safety of Americans

Q. How do you justify releasing these leaked secret documents, despite our government warning you that doing so may jeopardize the safety of Americans?

A. We redacted or withheld documents that we believed could put lives at risk — Americans or not. For example, we agreed to excise the names of guards or interrogators who could conceivably be targets of reprisals. But a claim of "jeopardizing the safey of Americans" is a slippery slope. Some people would argue that simply drawing attention to Guantánamo Bay arouses hostility toward Americans. (That argument was made about the photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.) In weighing such concerns, we listen respectfully to the arguments of officials, but we do not surrender our own judgment.

What to Withhold

Q.The Times has redacted information from the documents, but to what extent has the paper withheld documents in their entirety? The reasons for detainment in the summaries often are brief and cursory at best.

A. The Times has published so far only a small selection of the detainee assessments — about 20 out of more than 700 in the trove of documents — including the ones referred to in our articles and a few more of high-profile detainees. We may publish more, and WikiLeaks and several other news organizations are also publishing some of the documents. The Times has not withheld any entire documents for reasons of sensitivity, but we have made very limited redactions to protect individuals who might be harmed if named publicly, and to remove numbers of intelligence reports.

Omar Khadr

Q. Are there any mention of Omar Khadr in the WikiLeaks documents? Why does the U.S. government continue to hold this young man in Guantánamo when doing so flies in the face of so many principles of justice that the Obama administration expounds internationally?

A. The archive includes a 2-page assessment of Omar Khadr dated January 2004. If you are curious you can read it on the WikiLeaks site. But it wasn't among the initial files that The New York Times selected to publish, because it is relatively uninteresting. First, the basic narrative of what the government believed about Mr. Khadr's actions had already come out — in far greater detail — as a result of his prosecution before a military commission on war crimes charges, which resulted in his guilty plea. Moreover, unlike some other assessments, the one of Mr. Khadr does not reveal previously undisclosed reasons or sources for the government's beliefs about him.

At his trial last fall, a military tribunal technically sentenced Mr. Khadr to 40 years in prison, but he will serve much less time than that. In exchange for his guilty plea, prosecutors capped the time he would actually serve at eight years. Moreover, he probably will be transferred late next year to a prison in Canada, where he would eligible to apply for parole after serving two years and eight months.