Secret Case Against Detainee Crumbles

But there was more to the story, as there so often is at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba. Eight months after that newly disclosed assessment of Mr. Gharani was written by military intelligence officials, a federal judge examined the secret evidence. Saying that it was “plagued with internal inconsistencies” and largely based on the word of two other Guantánamo detainees whose reliability was in question, he ruled in January 2009 that Mr. Gharani should be released. The Obama administration sent him to Chad about five months later.

The secret assessment of Mr. Gharani, like many of the detainee dossiers made available to The New York Times and other news organizations, reflected few doubts about the peril he might have posed. He was rated “high risk,” and military officials recommended that he not be freed. But now, a comparison of the assessment’s conclusions with other information provides a case study in the ambiguities that surround many of the men who have passed through the prison at Guantánamo Bay.

The murkiness of the secret intelligence — and the fact that interrogators gathered much of their information from the Guantánamo equivalent of jailhouse informers — has been highlighted in news reports and has drawn criticism from human rights groups in recent days. But some commentators who say the government faced difficulties sorting intelligence in a time of war have noted that such reports were often uncertain, based on bits of information, educated guesses and accounts of witnesses with their own agendas.

“Why is anybody shocked here?” asked James Jay Carafano, a national security expert at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “The nature of intelligence is it is ambiguous sometimes. It is sometimes based on sources you wouldn’t take to Sunday school.”

Mr. Gharani’s was not the only case to crumble when the Guantánamo intelligence was tested in court. Judges have been unpersuaded by the government’s evidence in several habeas corpus cases, including another federal judge who in 2009 threw out “90 percent” of the case against a young detainee from Afghanistan, Mohammed Jawad, because it was based on a confession he gave that she ruled was “the function of torture.” Mr. Jawad was released soon after.

Mr. Gharani, who was one of Guantánamo’s youngest prisoners, has said he was subjected to abusive treatment at the prison, including solitary confinement and?sleep deprivation.

His May 2008 prisoner assessment unambiguously states the most elementary of facts: born in Medina, Saudi Arabia, in 1981.

The document, though, contains few clues that even such statements may be uncertain. In an interview, Mr. Gharani’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, called the quality of the information in the dossier “drivel.” He said Mr. Gharani was six years younger than the military believed. That means he would have been 11, not 17, when he was said to have been linked to a London terrorist cell.

“After seven years of having him in custody,” Mr. Stafford Smith said, “they didn’t even know how old he was.”

The dossier noted that at Guantánamo, Mr. Gharani had confessed to being a member of Al Qaeda and then retracted his admission. “His original admission is assessed to be truthful,” the file said with little explanation.

The strongest statements in the assessment, which was a pattern in many of the files, were attributed to other detainees. In Mr. Gharani’s case, two of those were a Yemeni and a Saudi detainee who provided incriminating information that was quoted in many of the dossiers.

For Mr. Gharani’s file, the two serial informers provided telling details. One, Yasim Muhammed Basardah, said he recalled traveling with Mr. Gharani and other members of Al Qaeda. The other, Abdul Hakim Bukhary, said he had heard that Mr. Gharani was a member of the London terrorist cell and claimed that he “would sing about what he was going to do to the Americans” if he were released.

The assertions from the two men, both since released from Guantánamo, did not note information that might have put their damaging claims in context.

Mr. Basardah, according to other documents reviewed by federal judges in court cases, was an unreliable informer with serious psychiatric problems. The references to Mr. Bukhary did not provide an important caveat: his own dossier said he had acknowledged deliberately misleading interrogators and “has no recollection of a lot of things.”

 

THE GUANTÁNAMO FILES: Libyan, Once a Detainee, Is Now a U.S. Ally of Sorts

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DARNAH, Libya — For more than five years, Abu Sufian Ibrahim Ahmed Hamuda bin Qumu was a prisoner at the Guantánamo Bay prison, judged “a probable member of Al Qaeda” by the analysts there. They concluded in a newly disclosed 2005 assessment that his release would represent a “medium to high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the U.S., its interests and allies.”

Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi is a rebel fighter in Libya.

These articles are based on a huge trove of secret documents leaked last year to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks and made available to The New York Times by another source on the condition of anonymity.

Editors and reporters who worked on these articles will be answering select questions about the coverage of the material.

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Today, Mr. Qumu, 51, is a notable figure in the Libyan rebels’ fight to oust Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, reportedly a leader of a ragtag band of fighters known as the Darnah Brigade for his birthplace, this shabby port town of 100,000 people in northeast Libya. The former enemy and prisoner of the United States is now an ally of sorts, a remarkable turnabout resulting from shifting American policies rather than any obvious change in Mr. Qumu.

He was a tank driver in the Libyan Army in the 1980s, when the Central Intelligence Agency was spending billions to support religious militants trying to drive Soviet troops out of Afghanistan. Mr. Qumu moved to Afghanistan in the early 1990s, just as Osama bin Laden and other former mujahedeen were violently turning against their former benefactor, the United States.

He was captured in Pakistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, accused of being a member of the militant Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and sent to Guantánamo — in part because of information provided by Colonel Qaddafi’s government.

“The Libyan Government considers detainee a ‘dangerous man with no qualms about committing terrorist acts,’?” says the classified 2005 assessment, evidently quoting Libyan intelligence findings, which was obtained by The New York Times. “?‘He was known as one of the extremist commanders of the Afghan Arabs,’?” the Libyan information continues, referring to Arab fighters who remained in Afghanistan after the anti-Soviet jihad.

When that Guantánamo assessment was written, the United States was working closely with Colonel Qaddafi’s intelligence service against terrorism. Now, the United States is a leader of the international coalition trying to oust Colonel Qaddafi — and is backing with air power the rebels, including Mr. Qumu.

The classified Guantánamo assessment of Mr. Qumu claims that he suffered from “a non-specific personality disorder” and recounted — again citing the Libyan government as its source — a history of drug addiction and drug dealing and accusations of murder and armed assault.

In 1993, the document asserts, Mr. Qumu escaped from a Libyan prison, fled to Egypt and went on to Afghanistan, training at a camp run by Mr. bin Laden. At Guantánamo, Mr. Qumu denied knowledge of terrorist activities. He said he feared being returned to Libya, where he faced criminal charges, and asked to go to some other country where “You (the United States) can watch me,” according to a hearing summary.

Nonetheless, in 2007, he was sent from Guantánamo to Libya and released the next year in an amnesty for militants.

Colonel Qaddafi has cited claims about Mr. Qumu’s past in statements blaming Al Qaeda for the entire Libyan uprising. American officials have nervously noted the presence of at least a few former militants in the rebels’ ranks.

The walls of buildings along the road into Darnah are decorated with the usual anti-Qaddafi and pro-Western slogans, in English and Arabic, found all over eastern Libya. But there are notable additions: “No Qaeda” and “No to Extremism.”

Darnah has reason to be touchy. The town has a long history of Islamic militancy, including a revolt against Colonel Qaddafi’s rule led by Islamists in the mid-1990s that resulted in a vicious crackdown. Activists from here are credited with starting the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which later announced that it was affiliating with Al Qaeda, and which sent militants like Mr. Qumu to fight in Afghanistan.

Most famously, though, Darnah has a claim to being the world’s most productive recruiting ground for suicide bombers. An analysis of 600 suicide bombers in Iraq by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point found that of 440 who listed their hometowns in a recruiting roster, 52 were from Darnah, the most of any city, with Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 40 times as populous, as the next biggest source, sending 51.

In addition to Mr. Qumu, local residents say the Darnah Brigade is led by Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi, another Libyan thought to be a militant who was in Afghanistan during the Taliban’s rule, when Al Qaeda had training camps there.

Mr. Qumu did not turn up for a promised interview last week, but Mr. Hasadi did, in crumpled fatigues with a light beard and a lazy left eye, perpetually half-closed. He denied that Mr. Qumu was in his group, recently renamed the Martyrs of Abu Salim Brigade, after a prison in Tripoli where 1,200 inmates were slaughtered in 1996. Two of Mr. Qumu’s sons are in his brigade, he said.

“I don’t know how to convince everyone that we are not Al Qaeda here,” Mr. Hasadi said. “Our aim is to topple Qaddafi,” he added. “I know that you will never believe me, but it is true.”

For now, Western observers in Benghazi, the temporary rebel capital 180 miles from here, seem content to accept those assurances. “We’re more worried about Al Qaeda infiltration from outside than the indigenous ones” one said. “Most of them have a local agenda so they don’t present as much as a threat to the West.”

Rod Nordland reported from Darnah, and Scott Shane from Washington. Kareem Fahim contributed reporting from Benghazi, Libya.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 26, 2011

A picture caption on Monday with an article about Abu Sufian Ibrahim Ahmed Hamuda bin Qumu, a former inmate at the Guantánamo Bay prison who is now a notable figure in the Libyan rebels’ fight to oust Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, misidentified the subject of the picture. It was Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi, whom local residents identified as another leader of the rebel group known as the Darnah Brigage — not Mr. Qumu. (Mr. Hasadi, in an interview, denied that Mr. Qumu was in the group.)