15 years ago WikiLeaks released “The Guantánamo Files.” One week later, the US murdered Osama bin Laden.

15 years ago yesterday, on April 25, 2011, WikiLeaks released “The Guantánamo Files”, the last great collection of classified US documents from the treasure trove of files leaked by the whistleblower Chelsea Manning, following the release, in 2010, of the “Collateral Murder” video, the Afghan and Iraq war logs, and over 250,000 US diplomatic cables.

In early April 2011, I was asked by WikiLeaks to work as a media partner on the release of “The Guantánamo Files”, which consisted of 765 classified “detainee assessment briefs” from Guantánamo, covering most of the men and boys held by the US military since the prison opened in January 2002.

The files were, for anyone paying attention, a damming repudiation of any claims by the US that its operations at Guantánamo involved anything more than feeble attempts to fabricate reasons why most of those held were of any significance, as so much of the supposed evidence consisted of statements made by unreliable witnesses — the prisoners’ fellow prisoners, subjected to torture or other forms of abuse, or bribed to tell interrogators what they wanted to hear through the promise of better living conditions, or agreeing with whatever the interrogators said because they were exhausted from being dragged out of their cells at all times of the day or night for weeks, months or years.

All of the media partners — the Washington Post, McClatchy, El País, the Daily Telegraph, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, Aftonbladet, La Repubblica, L’Espresso and myself — had had the files for several weeks before publication, but we had to go to press suddenly on April 25, when it became clear that WikiLeaks’ former media partners, the Guardian and the New York Times, had secured the files from another source, and we had to try and pre-empt their publication.

The press release I wrote in the space of a few hours — “WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Files on All Guantánamo Prisoners”, posted on WikiLeaks’ page for the files, and posted on my own website as “WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Guantánamo Files, Exposes Detention Policy as a Construct of Lies” — was almost certainly one of the most significant articles I’ve written in my 20 years as an independent journalist.

In a briefing immediately afterwards, in the offices of the Daily Telegraph, at which representatives of all the other media partners were present, I tried to ensure that they all recognized the significance of the files, although you’d have to scrutinize their coverage to ascertain how many of them took the message on board. Ironically, some of the best coverage came via the Guardian, particularly via articles that honed in on the testimonies of two prolific but fundamentally unreliable witnesses — a Yemeni, Yasim Basardah, well-known within the prison as a notorious liar, and the torture victim Abu Zubaydah.

What has never received enough attention is the fact that, just one week after the release of the files, the Obama administration suddenly felt compelled to launch a Special Forces raid on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, extrajudicially killing Al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden.

Clearly, this was a raid planned well in advance, for which rehearsals using recreations of the compound had reportedly taken place on April 10 and April 18, but the result was that any further focus on the files was complete swept aside as the world was engulfed in responses to the killing.

What was also never adequately explained was why bin Laden was killed, and not captured for questioning, given that he knew so much. As I saw it at the time, it was a continuation of the Wild West-style vengeance that had ruled the whole of the “war on terror”, although it also fed the narrative of those who had always maintained that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job.

What also became abundantly clear, unfortunately, was that opportunistic commentators would seize on bin Laden’s death to use it, cynically, to suggest that what it proved was that the US’s post-9/11 torture program had been essential, even though the interrogations that had yielded information on bin Laden’s couriers, which, apparently, eventually led to his location being identified, had, very specifically, not involved the use of torture.

These commentators also suggested, or implied, that locating bin Laden was a validation of the continued existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, even though there was no evidence whatsoever that this was the case.

Although both “The Guantánamo Files” and the significance of what they revealed were erased as a topic of mainstream media interest as a result of bin Laden’s death, I analyzed them in great detail throughout the rest of the year, eventually producing 34 long articles, forensically analyzing the stories of 422 of the prisoners, which can be found on my website, with the earlier articles also published on WikiLeaks’ website.

Exhaustion and a lack of funds prevented me from completing the project, but what I completed stands, I believe, as the most detailed analysis of the prisoners’ stories available anywhere, and as a resounding condemnation of the US government’s shameful post-9/11 policy of arbitrarily rounding up individuals seized in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere in the world, declaring them all as “the worst of the worst”, and then, through devious and brutal means, seeking to confirm those unfounded assertions through the extraction of largely worthless confessions that fall apart under any kind of serious scrutiny. 

For “The Guantánamo Files”, see: wikileaks.org/gitmo

For my article, “WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Guantánamo Files, Exposes Detention Policy as a Construct of Lies”, see: andyworthington.co.uk/2…

For Yasim Basardah, see: theguardian.com/world/2…

For Abu Zubaydah, see: image.guardian.co.uk/sy…

And for my 34 articles analyzing the files on 422 of the prisoners, see: