Senior American intelligence and military officials directly contradicted the Bush administration yesterday, saying not a single detainee at Guantanamo Bay was a high-ranking terrorist.
06/22/2004
Telegraph.co.uk
The administration has consistently defended indefinite detention at Guantanamo - a legal black hole thanks to its status as a United States naval base on Cuban soil - by calling the 595 inmates "the worst of a very bad lot".
But commanders and intelligence operatives who have reviewed reports of interrogations and read CIA assessments of detainees told The New York Times none was a terrorist leader. At best, they said, between one and two dozen were sworn members of al-Qa'eda, or militants with knowledge of the organisation's inner workings.
The officials - who included dozens of high-level military, intelligence or law-enforcement officials in America, Europe and the Middle East - also denied claims by Pentagon and White House aides that Guantanamo interrogations foiled imminent terrorist attacks. They said some detainees had provided useful leads or confirmed information about plots in the earliest stages of planning - "a very small piece of the mosaic", one said.
A top-secret CIA assessment in 2002 concluded that the initial waves of captures in Afghanistan picked up many low-level aspiring holy warriors and innocents.
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Original: 'No top terrorists at Guantanamo'