Saifullah Paracha, left, was one of a small circle of Al Qaeda operatives who explored ways to follow up on the hijackings with new attacks, according to classified Guantánamo files. April 25, 2011WASHINGTON — The enormous cache of computer files taken from Osama bin Laden’s compound contained a considerable quantity of pornographic videos, American officials said on Friday, adding a discordant note to the public image of the Islamist militant who long denounced the West for its lax sexual mores.
The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity about classified material, would not say whether there was evidence that Bin Laden or the other men living in the house had acquired or viewed the material.
The discovery of the pornography, first reported by Reuters, may not be surprising in a collection of five computers, 10 hard drives and dozens of thumb drives and CDs whose age and past ownership is not known.
But the disclosure could fuel accusations of hypocrisy against the founder of Al Qaeda, who was 54 and lived with three wives at the time of his death, and will be welcomed by counterterrorism officials because it could tarnish his legacy and erode the appeal of his brand of religious extremism.
In a 2002 “letter to the American people,” Bin Laden denounced American culture for its exploitation of women’s bodies in dress, advertising and popular culture.
“Your nation exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools, calling upon customers to purchase them,” he wrote. “You plaster your naked daughters across billboards in order to sell a product without any shame. You have brainwashed your daughters into believing they are liberated by wearing revealing clothes, yet in reality all they have liberated is your sexual desire.”
A team of intelligence analysts under the C.I.A.’s direction has been working to review the material seized from Bin Laden’s house in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by the Navy Seal team that killed him. Officials have said the material shows that Bin Laden was making notes about new ways to attack the United States and sending instructions by courier to subordinates and Qaeda affiliates.
Asked about the contents in an interview with Bloomberg Television, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said, “I’m not sure we have any plot” that the intelligence review had found.
“On the other hand, he did seem to have a goal around the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11,” Mr. Holder said. “Certainly, he wanted to harm and was in the advanced operational stage of pulling the levers in the Al Qaeda organization.”
But the Obama administration also released unflattering video footage of a gray-bearded Bin Laden, wearing a cloak and a ski cap and clutching a remote control while watching his own statements on television. The suggestion that he must have dyed his beard for video recordings and was intensely concerned with his image could erode his reputation in the Muslim world as a charismatic and selfless leader.
Also on Friday, Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, confirmed that American interrogators had questioned Bin Laden’s three wives for the first time on Thursday, 10 days after they were taken from the compound by Pakistani security forces. He declined to give more details, saying, “I can’t characterize the interaction.”
The three widows, Khairiah Sabar, Siham Sabar and Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, who is also known as Amal Ahmed al-Sadah, had been held and questioned for days by Pakistani officials before the C.I.A. interrogators spoke to them. Ms. Abdulfattah, who is Yemeni, was shot in the leg during the assault on Bin Laden’s compound by Navy Seal commandos.
American officials have many urgent questions for them: where other top Qaeda operatives are, where Bin Laden lived before moving to Abbottabad and whether any Pakistani military or intelligence officers visited the compound. But the wives are believed to have lived cloistered lives, and it is unclear what they may know or be willing to tell.
Except, that is, for the lawyers who represent the prisoners.
On Monday, hours after WikiLeaks, The New York Times and other news organizations began publishing the documents online, the Justice Department informed Guantánamo defense lawyers that the documents remained legally classified even after they were made public.
Because the lawyers have security clearances, they are obligated to treat the readily available files “in accordance with all relevant security precautions and safeguards” — handling them, for example, only in secure government facilities, said the notice from the department’s Court Security Office.
It is only the latest absurdist challenge posed by the flood of classified material obtained by WikiLeaks over the past year: field reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; State Department cables; and now the military’s risk assessments of 700 past or present Guantánamo prisoners.
Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern law professor who represents Abu Zubaydah, the detainee accused of being a terrorist facilitator who was waterboarded by the Central Intelligence Agency, said he could not comment on the newly disclosed assessment of his client, which is posted on The Times Web site.
“Everyone else can talk about it,” Mr. Margulies said. “I can’t talk about it.”
The ballooning category of public-but-classified documents has befuddled officials and led to a series of unusual pronouncements from government agencies and those who work with them.
In December, Columbia University warned international relations students that commenting on the documents disclosed by WikiLeaks online or linking to them might endanger their chances of getting a government job. The same month, the United States Agency for International Development told workers that viewing the documents on an unclassified computer at work or home could violate security rules that govern their employment. In February, an Air Force unit cautioned that employees and even their family members could be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for looking at the WikiLeaks documents at home.
Some of those warnings were quickly modified or withdrawn after attracting public ridicule. But the general principle that the leaked files remain classified remains in effect, with varying consequences.
Some foreigners applying for asylum in the United States have attached diplomatic cables printed from the Internet that describe repression in their native countries — requiring the Department of Homeland Security to store their applications in special safes and to apply cumbersome security rules.
State Department employees have confided that they read leaked cables on newspaper Web sites at home rather than risk trouble by viewing them at work. A Times reporter who appeared with a State Department official on a recent panel was advised not to show leaked cables as slides — the official was prohibited from looking at them.
But the prohibition for Guantánamo lawyers has serious implications, said Mr. Margulies, who wrote a book on Guantánamo and has represented five prisoners there. Decisions about who gets released have been influenced by politics and public pressure as much as by legal standards, he said.
“It’s important to be able to use these documents to shape and inform the discussion in the public square,” he said. If a leaked risk assessment contains clearly disproved accusations about a prisoner, a lawyer should be able to publicly refute it, he said.
On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told reporters that he considered the dissemination of the classified Guantánamo documents, prepared under the Bush administration, to be “deplorable.” And he said the Obama administration would not make public, even with redactions, its own assessments of the 240 prisoners who were still at Guantánamo when it took office in 2009.
The new files, Mr. Holder said, “involve a whole variety of information gleaned from a wide assortment of sources, some of which are classified.”
“That being the case,” he continued, “I would be concerned about putting out information that was incomplete.”
Meanwhile, Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said the department was trying to answer questions posed by lawyers for Guantánamo prisoners about the restrictions on using the leaked documents.
“We’re working through these issues right now,” Mr. Boyd said. “We simply want to ensure that any information released by WikiLeaks is handled properly.”
WASHINGTON — A trove of more than 700 classified military documents provides new and detailed accounts of the men who have done time at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, and offers new insight into the evidence against the 172 men still locked up there.
The American prison at Guantánamo Bay still holds 172 detainees, most rated “high risk.”Military intelligence officials, in assessments of detainees written between February 2002 and January 2009, evaluated their histories and provided glimpses of the tensions between captors and captives. What began as a jury-rigged experiment after the 2001 terrorist attacks now seems like an enduring American institution, and the leaked files show why, by laying bare the patchwork and contradictory evidence that in many cases would never have stood up in criminal court or a military tribunal.
The documents meticulously record the detainees’ “pocket litter” when they were captured: a bus ticket to Kabul, a fake passport and forged student ID, a restaurant receipt, even a poem. They list the prisoners’ illnesses — hepatitis, gout, tuberculosis, depression. They note their serial interrogations, enumerating — even after six or more years of relentless questioning — remaining “areas of potential exploitation.” They describe inmates’ infractions — punching guards, tearing apart shower shoes, shouting across cellblocks. And, as analysts try to bolster the case for continued incarceration, they record years of detainees’ comments about one another.
The secret documents, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, reveal that most of the 172 remaining prisoners have been rated as a “high risk” of posing a threat to the United States and its allies if released without adequate rehabilitation and supervision. But they also show that an even larger number of the prisoners who have left Cuba — about a third of the 600 already transferred to other countries — were also designated “high risk” before they were freed or passed to the custody of other governments.
The documents are largely silent about the use of the harsh interrogation tactics at Guantánamo — including sleep deprivation, shackling in stress positions and prolonged exposure to cold temperatures — that drew global condemnation. Several prisoners, though, are portrayed as making up false stories about being subjected to abuse.
The government’s basic allegations against many detainees have long been public, and have often been challenged by prisoners and their lawyers. But the dossiers, prepared under the Bush administration, provide a deeper look at the frightening, if flawed, intelligence that has persuaded the Obama administration, too, that the prison cannot readily be closed.
Prisoners who especially worried counterterrorism officials included some accused of being assassins for Al Qaeda, operatives for a canceled suicide mission and detainees who vowed to their interrogators that they would wreak revenge against America.
The military analysts’ files provide new details about the most infamous of their prisoners, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Sometime around March 2002, he ordered a former Baltimore resident to don a suicide bomb vest and carry out a “martyrdom” attack against Pervez Musharraf, then Pakistan’s president, according to the documents. But when the man, Majid Khan, got to the Pakistani mosque that he had been told Mr. Musharraf would visit, the assignment turned out to be just a test of his “willingness to die for the cause.”
The dossiers also show the seat-of-the-pants intelligence gathering in war zones that led to the incarcerations of innocent men for years in cases of mistaken identity or simple misfortune. In May 2003, for example, Afghan forces captured Prisoner 1051, an Afghan named Sharbat, near the scene of a roadside bomb explosion, the documents show. He denied any involvement, saying he was a shepherd. Guantánamo debriefers and analysts agreed, citing his consistent story, his knowledge of herding animals and his ignorance of “simple military and political concepts,” according to his assessment. Yet a military tribunal declared him an “enemy combatant” anyway, and he was not sent home until 2006.
Obama administration officials condemned the publication of the classified documents, which were obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks last year but provided to The Times by another source. The officials pointed out that an administration task force set up in January 2009 reviewed the information in the prisoner assessments, and in some cases came to different conclusions. Thus, they said, the documents published by The Times may not represent the government’s current view of detainees at Guantánamo.
Among the findings in the files:
?The 20th hijacker: The best-documented case of an abusive interrogation at Guantánamo was the coercive questioning, in late 2002 and early 2003, of Mohammed Qahtani. A Saudi believed to have been an intended participant in the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Qahtani was leashed like a dog, sexually humiliated and forced to urinate on himself. His file says, “Although publicly released records allege detainee was subject to harsh interrogation techniques in the early stages of detention,” his confessions “appear to be true and are corroborated in reporting from other sources.” But claims that he is said to have made about at least 16 other prisoners — mostly in April and May 2003 — are cited in their files without any caveat.
Charlie Savage reported from Washington, and William Glaberson and Andrew W. Lehren from New York. Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington, and Benjamin Weiser and Andrei Scheinkman from New York.
In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Paracha, 63, was one of a small circle of Al Qaeda operatives who explored ways to follow up on the hijackings with new attacks, according to the classified Guantánamo files made available to The New York Times.
Working with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 9/11 planner who in early 2002 gave him $500,000 to $600,000 “for safekeeping,” Mr. Paracha offered his long experience in the shipping business for a scheme to move plastic explosives into the United States inside containers of women’s and children’s clothing, the files assert.
“Detainee desired to help Al Qaeda ‘do something big against the U.S.,’?” one of his co-conspirators, Ammar al-Baluchi, told Guantánamo interrogators, the files say. Mr. Paracha discussed obtaining biological or nuclear weapons as well, though he was concerned that detectors at ports “would make it difficult to smuggle radioactive materials into the country,” the file says.
Mr. Paracha’s assessment is among more than 700 classified documents that fill in new details of Al Qaeda’s efforts to make 9/11 just the first in a series of attacks to cripple the United States, intentions thwarted as the Central Intelligence Agency captured Mr. Mohammed and other leaders of the terrorist network.
The plots reportedly discussed by Mr. Mohammed and various operatives, none of them acted upon, included plans for a new wave of aircraft attacks on the West Coast, filling an apartment with leaked natural gas and detonating it, blowing up gas stations and even cutting the cables holding up the Brooklyn Bridge.
For the small circle of Qaeda operatives described in the December 2008 assessment of Mr. Paracha, terrorism appears to have been a family affair. There was Mr. Mohammed, the terrorist network’s top plotter, and his nephew, Mr. Baluchi, who was married to another militant, an American-trained neuroscientist, Aafia Siddiqui. And there was Mr. Paracha and his son, Uzair.
The newly revealed assessments, obtained last year by the group WikiLeaks and provided by another source to The Times, have revived the dispute, nearly as old as the prison, over whether mistreatment of some prisoners there and the prison’s operation outside the criminal justice system invalidate the government’s conclusions about the detainees.
Hina Shamsi, director of the national security project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the assessments “are rife with uncorroborated evidence, information obtained through torture, speculation, errors and allegations that have been proven false.”
Likewise, David H. Remes, a lawyer who represents the elder Mr. Paracha, said in an interview on Monday that while he had not seen the assessment, its conclusion that Mr. Paracha posed a “high risk” to American interests was without foundation.
“The notion that he ever did anything that justified his detention, or ever was or is any kind of threat to the United States, is preposterous,” Mr. Remes said. “He is a 63-year-old man with a serious heart condition and severe diabetes, and?he has been nothing but cooperative with the authorities.”
What Mr. Paracha wants, Mr. Remes added,?is either a transfer back to his native country, Pakistan, or “a definitive adjudication of his case.”
Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, condemned on Monday the publication of what he called “documents obtained illegally” and noted the military’s findings about some detainees had been changed by a new review under President Obama. The detailed results of that review, however, remain secret.
Mr. Carney said the president remained committed to closing the Guantánamo prison someday. But Mr. Obama’s review identified about 50 detainees his advisers said could not be tried and were too dangerous to release, and Congress has imposed restrictions on bringing prisoners to the United States.
The portrait of Mr. Paracha is one of the striking ones to emerge from the files. The documents say he attended the New York Institute of Technology in the early 1970s and worked as a travel agent in New York for 13 years.
He was arrested in Bangkok in July 2003 after Uzair, who was already in F.B.I. custody in New York, “acknowledged” his father was a militant, the assessment says. Uzair Paracha was convicted in a 2005 trial on charges including material support for terrorism and is serving a 30-year sentence in federal prison.
According to his Guantánamo assessment, Saifullah Paracha had “provided useful information concerning senior Al Qaeda members” but “attempted to deceive and misinform intelligence and law enforcement personnel about his own activities.” As a result, the assessment draws heavily on statements by others, notably Mr. Mohammed, who was subjected to waterboarding and other brutal treatment during his interrogation by the C.I.A.
But Mr. Paracha’s assessment suggests that he did not deny militant connections at the highest level. “Detainee claimed he met UBL on a trip to Afghanistan in December 1999 or January 2000,” the documents say, using the government’s initials for Osama bin Laden. It says he offered to let Mr. bin Laden use his broadcasting business in Pakistan to generate propaganda films for Al Qaeda.
Later, Mr. bin Laden dispatched Mr. Mohammed to talk further about the idea, and Mr. Paracha explained “his vision of dedicating a program on his broadcasting network depicting UBL quoting Koranic verses.”
After 9/11, Mr. Paracha’s discussions focused on new plots, the files say. A Casio digital diary he was carrying when he was arrested “contained references to military chemical warfare agents, and their effects on humans,” according to the classified assessment. The document says Mr. Paracha told interrogators he had worked with Abdul Qadeer Khan, considered to be the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program and a major proliferator of nuclear technology.
Edward D. Wilford, a lawyer who represented the son at his 2005 trial, said his client had played no “witting” role in his father’s arrest.
“He was not a part of it in any way,” he said. “He didn’t make any calls. He didn’t make any contact. In fact, he was being held incommunicado. He didn’t have any way of knowing what was going on.” The son had been jailed in Manhattan on a material-witness warrant after his questioning by the F.B.I. in March 2003. He was charged criminally in August 2003, after his father’s arrest.
The relationship between father and son is only hinted at in the assessment report. It says that analysts concluded that Saifullah Paracha was “hiding aspects of his son’s extremist activities.” The son, though, talked about his father and his father’s relationship with Mr. bin Laden while testifying in his own defense.
A prosecutor asked whether Uzair Paracha had told F.B.I. agents that his father admired Mr. bin Laden. “I don’t remember if my father actually said that he admired bin Laden,” the son testified. “He said that bin Laden was a humble person and he had a simple way of life.”
WASHINGTON — Said Mohammed Alam Shah, a 24-year-old Afghan who had lost a leg as a teenager, told interrogators at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that he had been conscripted by the Taliban as a driver before being detained in 2001. He had been caught, he said, as he tried to “rescue his younger brother from the Taliban.”
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.Military analysts believed him. Mr. Shah, who had been outfitted with a prosthetic leg by prison doctors, was “cooperative” and “has not expressed thoughts of violence or made threats toward the U.S. or its allies,” according to a sympathetic 2003 assessment. Its conclusion: “Detainee does not pose a future threat to the U.S. or U.S. interests.”
So in 2004 Mr. Shah was sent back to Afghanistan — where he promptly revealed himself to be Abdullah Mehsud, a Pakistan-born militant, and began plotting mayhem. He recorded jihadist videos, organized a Taliban force to fight American troops, planned an attack on Pakistan’s interior minister that killed 31 people, oversaw the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers, and finally detonated a suicide bomb in 2007 as the Pakistani Army closed in. His martyrdom was hailed in an audio message by none other than Osama bin Laden.
The Guantánamo analysts’ complete misreading of Abdullah Mehsud was included among hundreds of classified assessments of detainees at the prison in Cuba that were obtained by The New York Times. The unredacted assessments give the fullest public picture to date of the prisoners held at Guantánamo over the past nine years. They show that the United States has imprisoned hundreds of men for years without trial based on a difficult and strikingly subjective evaluation of who they were, what they had done in the past and what they might do in the future. The 704 assessment documents use the word “possibly” 387 times, “unknown” 188 times and “deceptive” 85 times.
Viewed with judges’ rulings on legal challenges by detainees, the documents reveal that the analysts sometimes ignored serious flaws in the evidence — for example, that the information came from other detainees whose mental illness made them unreliable. Some assessments quote witnesses who say they saw a detainee at a camp run by Al Qaeda but omit the witnesses’ record of falsehood or misidentification. They include detainees’ admissions without acknowledging other government documents that show the statements were later withdrawn, often attributed to abusive treatment or torture.
A Growing Wariness
Written between 2002 and 2009, the assessments reflect a growing wariness on the part of Guantánamo analysts. Early on, the reports are just a page or two and often sanguine in tone. By 2008, after scorching publicity about released detainees who joined Al Qaeda and the dwindling of the prison population to hard-core detainees, the assessments are decidedly more cautious.
For every case of an Abdullah Mehsud — someone wrongly judged a minimal threat — there are several instances in which prisoners rated “high risk” were released and have not engaged in wrongdoing. Murat Kurnaz, a German resident of Turkish ancestry, was judged in a 2006 assessment to be a member of Al Qaeda who fell into the most dangerous category: “high risk” and “likely to pose a threat to the U.S., its interests and allies.”
Nonetheless, American authorities, under pressure from both Germany and Turkey, overruled the analysts and sent Mr. Kurnaz home to Germany three months later. He did not join the global jihad but instead became a prominent critic of Guantánamo, writing a book and making countless media appearances to denounce the American prison.
Among the most revealing of the leaked documents is a 17-page guide for analysts, evidently prepared by military intelligence trainers, on how to gauge the danger posed by a detainee. It lists major clusters of detainees, including the so-called Dirty 30, who were the bodyguards of Mr. bin Laden, as well as the large group of accused Qaeda operatives captured with Abu Zubaydah, an important terrorist facilitator, at two guesthouses in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in 2002. It lists nine mosques associated with Al Qaeda, in Quebec, Milan, London, Yemen and Pakistan.
The guide shows how analysts seized upon the tiniest details as a potential litmus test for risk. If a prisoner had a Casio F91W watch, it might be an indication he had attended a Qaeda bomb-making course where such watches were handed out — though that model is sold around the world to this day. (Likewise, the assessment of a Yemeni prisoner suggests a dire use for his pocket calculator: “Calculators may be used for indirect fire calculations such as those required for artillery fire.”)
A prisoner caught without travel documents? It might mean he had been trained to discard them to make identification harder, the guide explains. A detainee who claimed to be a simple farmer or a cook, or in the honey business or searching for a wife? Those were common Taliban and Qaeda cover stories, the analysts were told.
And a classic Catch-22: “Refusal to cooperate,” the guide says, is a Qaeda resistance technique.
Yet the guide appears to be the product of years of experience at trying to turn bits of evidence of varying reliability into a conclusion. Notably, it cites as a cautionary tale the early misjudgment about Abdullah Mehsud, the Pakistani suicide bomber, who had claimed he was forced to join the Taliban. He was “an example,” the guide says, “of a detainee who successfully applied the conscription cover story as a means to secure his release from U.S. custody.”
Scott Shane reported from Washington, and Benjamin Weiser from New York. Reporting was contributed by Charlie Savage from Washington, and William Glaberson, Andrew W. Lehren and Andrei Scheinkman from New York.
