03/15/06

The Guantanamo Bay documents: from the Pentagon to the public


By The Associated Press

A U.S. court ordered the Pentagon to give The Associated Press transcripts of secret hearings at its jail in Guantanamo Bay -- but it didn't require the documents to be easy to read or follow.

The more than 5,000 pages of documents, everything from typed transcripts to handwritten letters, were scanned into files on a CD-ROM with no indexing or even titles to indicate whose hearing was being conducted.

Culling the names of 186 detainees took the better part of two weeks by AP reporters, editors and researchers in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico and the United States, seeking details that would reveal the identities of prisoners held for years at Guantanamo Bay.

On many of the documents, names were incomplete, mentioned in passing or spelled phonetically. Most of the names were buried deep in the transcripts, or not included at all.

The Pentagon turned over the documents on March 3, a week after U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff of New York ruled in favor of the AP in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

The AP sued the Defense Department in April 2005, seeking the release of transcripts and other documents related to Guantanamo hearings. The Pentagon released nearly 2,000 pages the following month, but with detainees' names and nationalities blacked out.

Last month, Rakoff ordered the Pentagon to release the documents without redactions of the detainees' information.

On March 3, a Department of Defense lawyer turned over the CD-ROM containing .pdf files of the documents at the Pentagon to an AP technician, who uploaded them to AP servers so they could be viewed by reporters and editors throughout the world.

Within days, technicians had created a searchable database from the released documents, allowing AP to conclude the documents identified 186 detainees from a dozen countries.

The AP has filed other lawsuits against the Pentagon seeking more information from Guantanamo Bay to help produce the first authoritative, public record of every detainee who has passed through the detention center.