This part of the Gitmo releases is particularly interesting:
In many cases, the detainees made direct allegations of others' involvement in militant activities; in others, they gave contextual information used to help build the edges of a case.
While many other intelligence sources were referred to in those detainee assessment forms, including in some cases confessions by the detainees themselves, the inclusion of information from such a highly questionable group of men would seem to raise serious issues about a key piece of the "mosaic" process at Guantanamo and the decisions that followed.
Amy Davidson concludes that "the interrogation system at Guantánamo comes across as a maddening, multi-directional game of telephone." In the civilian world, this phenomenon is known as jailhouse snitching. Prisoners eager to cut a deal with the authorities for less or easier time have a strong incentive to incriminate others, even falsely. The Innocence Project estimates that 45 percent of capital cases since 1973 in which the individual was wrongly convicted involved jailhouse snitching.
The stakes at someplace like Gitmo are raised even higher, both because the detainees themselves have no set time to serve, and because the authorities themselves are desperate for information that might help prevent another terrorist attack on American soil. It's not hard to understand how that set of circumstances can work to incentivize the collection of false intelligence information. False intelligence information, of course, doesn't make us any more secure -- quite the opposite.
