Gitmo Springs a Leak

Guantanamo's inner workings — or lack thereof — see the light of day.

WikiLeaks struck again over the weekend, releasing a trove of classified memos on the 759 terror suspects held over the last decade at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The Guardian's coverage of this round of leaks is again unparalleled, featuring profiles on every prisoner – including Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, who has been detained in Cuba since he was 15 – at the U.S. base, a ragtag crew summarized pointedly as “the bad, the unprosecutable, and the homeless.”

Glenn Greenwald of Salon, the North American media's staunchest defender of WikiLeaks, finds that these leaks indict U.S. President Barack Obama for his continued support for his predecessor's policy on indefinite detention, likely the biggest reversal of his presidency. “The idea of trusting the government to imprison people for life based on secret, untested evidence never reviewed by a court should repel any decent or minimally rational person, but these newly released files demonstrate how warped is this indefinite detention policy specifically,” says Greenwald. An 89-year-old senile farmer and a 14-year-old boy kidnapped by the Taliban are just two of the more glaring examples of how the flimsiest of evidence was used to detain civilians halfway around the world, and severely undermine the president's recent executive order to keep those still at Gitmo for as long as it takes to find them a new home.

Those two cases highlight a long list of unlucky Muslim men who have been caught up in the United States' ever-broadening dragnet, overshadowing whatever usefulness Gitmo might have held for prosecuting true terror threats, such as 9/11 mastermind Kalid Sheikh Mohammed, writes The New Yorker's Amy Davidson. “Being at Guantanamo has served to keep them from facing a jury or judge and answering for their crimes,” she writes. Perhaps Obama, who has professed disdain toward the prison for as long it's been open, ought to have leaked these memos himself, Davidson posits, to solidify his case over why it should be closed. “Instead, Obama never effectively challenged the image of Guantanamo as a sort of Phantom Zone of super villains,” she writes, “rather than the humiliating hodgepodge it is.”