The Guantánamo Files: JTF-GTMO detainee assessment briefs

The Detainee Assessment Briefs are memoranda from Joint Task Force Guantánamo to US Southern Command, classified Secret, recommending whether each prisoner should continue to be held or be transferred to another government. Most follow a standard format: personal details and Internment Serial Number; physical and mental health; a recommendation and executive summary; the prisoner's own account; capture information and the stated reasons for transfer to Guantánamo; an assessment of the threat he posed and his intelligence value; and his status as an 'enemy combatant'. Many include photographs.

Our archive covers 765 of the 779 men held at Guantánamo since the camp opened in January 2002, including the first 201 prisoners released between 2002 and 2004, about whom little had previously been published. The Guardian reported that the files showed prisoners held on thin evidence or on the word of a small number of informants, among them an 89-year-old Afghan villager with senile dementia and a 14-year-old kidnap victim, while also showing that some of those released had been rated 'high risk'.

The files also included guidance documents for interrogators, among them a matrix of 'threat indicators' that listed Pakistan's ISI alongside groups such as al-Qaida and Hezbollah.

I began publishing the files on Sunday 24 April 2011 with partners including the Washington Post, McClatchy, the Telegraph, El País, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Aftonbladet, La Repubblica, L'Espresso and Andy Worthington. The New York Times also obtained the files and shared them with the Guardian and NPR; the Guardian's first report was published in the early hours of 25 April (UK time). US officials said the files had been 'obtained illegally by WikiLeaks', and the Pentagon press secretary, Geoff Morrell, said that any given assessment 'may or may not represent the current view of a given detainee', since the Obama administration's Guantánamo Review Task Force had sometimes reached different conclusions (Guardian).

The source of this material was established in court. Chelsea Manning (then known as Bradley Manning), a US Army intelligence analyst, was convicted by a military judge, Colonel Denise Lind, on 30 July 2013 of offences including Espionage Act violations relating to the leak of the Afghan and Iraq war logs, the State Department cables and the Guantánamo files; she was acquitted of the most serious charge, aiding the enemy. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison on 21 August 2013; President Barack Obama commuted the sentence in January 2017. The 2019 US indictment against me alleged that Manning provided some 800 Guantánamo detainee assessment briefs to WikiLeaks.