"Every single Arab was to be sent to Guantanamo – there were no exceptions whatsoever"

[kpete]

In response to your second question, so many innocent men ended up in Guantanamo for three reasons: firstly, because the US authorities were offering substantial bounties for “al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects,” secondly, because their intelligence on the ground in Afghanistan was non-existent, and they ended up forming alliances with extremely untrustworthy characters, who used them to advance their own purposes (removing rivals, for example, by lying about them), and thirdly because, when the prisoners ended up in US custody (in prisons at Kandahar airport and Bagram airbase, which were used to process them for Guantanamo) there was no screening process.

The Article 5 battlefield tribunals, used by the US in every war since the Second World War, were abandoned, which was shocking. Held close to the time and place of capture, these allowed the military to separate soldiers from civilians caught up in the fog of war by allowing prisoners to call witnesses. In the first Gulf War, for example, at least 1200 tribunals were held, and over three-quarters of the prisoners were freed. There was no such filter in Afghanistan, so farmers and taxi drivers ended up in Guantanamo.

More shockingly, as was revealed by Chris Mackey, the pseudonym of a senior interrogator in Kandahar and Bagram, who wrote a book about his experiences, the orders from on high (at Camp Doha in Kuwait, where the prisoner lists and interrogation notes were sent) were that every single Arab was to be sent to Guantanamo – there were no exceptions whatsoever – and until June 2002 every Afghan was sent as well, until the local commanders found a way to hide the Afghans off the books to weed out some of the more obvious farmers and taxi drivers (although even this ploy failed to prevent dozens more Afghans being sent, pointlessly, to Guantanamo).

more at:
from comment @5
http://firedoglake.com/2008/10/04/fdl-book-salon-welcomes-andy-worthington-the-guantanamo-files/#comment-1666525

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Guantánamo: Government Says Six Years Is Not Long Enough To Prepare Evidence

“Now imagine that, after six and a half years of this imprisonment — in which, unlike convicted criminals on the US mainland, you have never been charged or tried, and have not been allowed a single visit from your loved ones — the highest court in the United States rules, in Boumediene v. Bush, that you have habeas corpus rights; in other words, the right to know why you are being held. And finally, imagine that, in response to this ruling, when the judges responsible for establishing the reviews have ordered the cases to be addressed “as expeditiously as possible,” and have set a deadline for the government to comply, your captors turn around and say that, after holding you for up to 2,444 days in Guantánamo, they need more time to prepare a case against you.

http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/09/23/guantanamo-government-says-six-years-is-not-long-enough-to-prepare-evidence/