Who are the prisoners of Guantánamo?
The Bush administration has repeatedly described the 450-500 men detained at Guantanamo as “the worst of the worst.” In the words of Vice President Dick Cheney (June 23, 2005), “The people that are there are people we picked up on the battlefield, primarily in Afghanistan. They’re terrorists. They’re bomb makers. They’re facilitators of terror. They’re members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban….We’ve let go those that we’ve deemed not to be a continuing threat. But the 520-some that are there now are serious, deadly threats to the United States.” [1] Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called them the “most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.” [2] Some of those charges may – or may not – be true of some of the Guantanamo detainees, such as the 14 alleged terrorist leaders recently transferred there from the secret CIA prisons where they were held previously. There’s mounting evidence, however, that for most of the detainees the reality is very different from w
