Im­agine that the more than 700 Guan­tanamo files re­leased two weeks ago by WikiLeaks con­tained in­for­ma­tion ex­plain­ing how in­ter­rogators ob­tained "in­tel­lig­ence" from "war on ter­ror" de­tainees cap­tured or sold to US for­ces after 9/11, such as this firsthand ac­count:

"On a co­u­ple of oc­cas­ions, I en­tered in­ter­view rooms to find a de­tainee chained hand and foot in a fetal posi­tion to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or de­fecated on them­selves and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more. On one oc­cas­ion, the air con­dition­ing had been tur­ned down so far and the tem­pera­ture was so cold in the room that the barefooted de­tainee was shak­ing with cold.

When I asked the (milita­ry police) what was going on I was told that in­ter­rogators from the day prior had or­dered this treat­ment and the de­tainee was not to be moved. On an­oth­er oc­cas­ion, the (air con­dition­er) had been tur­ned off, mak­ing the tem­pera­ture in the un­ven­tilated room pro­bab­ly well over 100 de­grees. The de­tainee was al­most un­consci­ous on the floor with a pile of hair next to him. He had ap­parent­ly been lit­eral­ly pull­ing his own hair out throug­hout the night."

That de­scrip­tion was taken di­rect­ly from an email writt­en by an FBI agent on August 2, 2004, and sent to of­fici­als at the agen­cy's head­quart­ers in Was­hington, DC, de­scrib­ing the tor­ture of one de­tainee as wit­nessed by the agent while he or she was stationed at Guan­tanamo.

After rea­d­ing those hor­rific de­tails, would you take at face value the in­for­ma­tion this de­tainee, who may have been a teenag­er, an el­der­ly man or a per­son who suf­fered from ment­al pro­blems, gave up to his in­ter­rogator?

Well, that's the im­press­ion one is left with after rea­d­ing the Guan­tanamo files, iden­tified by the govern­ment as De­tainee As­sess­ment Briefs (DAB). The docu­ments, pre­pared bet­ween 2002 and 2008 and sig­ned by top milita­ry of­fici­als stationed at the prison facil­ity, cer­tain­ly bolst­er the Bush ad­ministration's case that the de­tainees in cus­tody of the US milita­ry are the "worst of the worst," de­spite the sub­tle caveats about the verac­ity of the in­for­ma­tion.

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