15 ms·

The Guantanamo Files

262 points by dsplittgerber 15y ago

dpritchett 15y ago
Don't miss the detainee population visualizations put together by the NYT with help from CoffeeScript/Underscore/Backbone wizard Jeremy Ashkenas: http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo
- oinksoft 15y ago
  How is he a "wizard"? His personal site seems to feature graphics libraries.
  - southpolesteve 15y ago
    He is the primary author of Coffeescript: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script I am not sure, but I believe he also has authored or contributed to the others.
    - ellisd 15y ago
      Author of backbone.js and underscore.js as well.
  - ez77 15y ago
    Yeah, he's the kind of guy who is too busy getting things done to work on a personal site. Still, I find it amazing that he still manages to make some comments here from time to time.
- jashkenas 15y ago
  The Guantánamo Docket is a relaunch/redesign of an NYT project from 3 years ago. Andrei Scheinkman, Alan McLean, and Archie Tse of the Times, and Margot Williams of NPR, all deserve far more credit for making it happen under an impossible deadline.
  - dpritchett 15y ago
    A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.
- rhizome 15y ago
  I wouldn't brag about an affiliation to the NYT on this story, they're acting to undercut its significance. The reason why the WL dox came out last night is that Domscheit leaked them to the NYT (the NYT was not a primary recipient) and the NYT was trying to steal WL's thunder. Notice that the NYT had five stories published within a couple of hours, each multiple pages long. They were already ready to go, and notice the hawk-serving angle (recidivism) on all of them. No, I wouldn't brag on his behalf, as nice as the applet is.
blhack 15y ago
Is this still part of the Bradley Manning leak?
- killerdark 15y ago
  I don't think so. Manning leaked cables and somewhat classified documents from/to US embassies. These documents are internal US Department of Defense documents.
  - pemulis 15y ago
    He also (allegedly) leaked the Iraq and Afghanistan war documents, including the Collateral Murder video. So, assuming he is a Wikileaks source, he had access to a wide range of DoD files in addition to State Department files. The thing is, Manning didn't go into detail about any Gitmo files when chatting with Adrian Lamo, and, according to the Nation's Wikileaks pointsman Greg Mitchell, there were rumors that Wikileaks had secret Gitmo files before the alleged leaking from Manning took place. http://www.thenation.com/blog/160135/wikileaks-blog-guant%C3%A1namo-files http://www.thenation.com/blog/160135/wikileaks-blog-guant%C3... Remember, too, that Wikileaks released Gitmo's "Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures" way back in 2007. This leak could have come from anybody at any time. My feeling is that this was probably someone other than Manning, though I obviously don't have any real evidence to support that.
    - fleitz 15y ago
      Remember that Adrian Lamo was on the FBI radar before producing these chat logs, it could well be that he dealt with the FBI by producing chat logs that implicate someone else. It wouldn't exactly be the first time someone has lied to the FBI to get a reduced sentence, or avoid prosecution. We also know that the US gov't engages in torture to extract confessions so you should be skeptical of anything anyone who has been in US custody says. It's not just middle easterners, Canadian citizens have been tortured under US auspices.
      - pemulis 15y ago
mrcharles 15y ago
I was hoping the data would be in a text format so that I could build a tree of blame -- so basically you could see exactly how 'information' from someone who may not be giving accurate information impacted future prisoners. Sadly, it's all just embedded PDF files.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  OCR it. It sounds like an interesting thing to look at.
  - mrcharles 15y ago
    I thought about that, but given that I'd only need a tiny bit of info, and OCR being (potentially) prone to error, at that point it would probably be easier to just manually enter the information I'd need. But I'm lazy.
- conesus 15y ago
  It's all part of DocumentCloud, which means API access to the text of all that Guantanamo data. See how easy this can be: curl http://www.documentcloud.org/api/search.json?q=group:nytimes "total": 2821, "page": 1, "per_page": 10, "q": "group:nytimes", "documents": [{ "id": "86275-isn-10015-abd-al-rahim-al-nashiri-jtf-gtmo", "title": "ISN 10015 - Abd al Rahim al Nashiri - JTF-GTMO Detainee Assessment", "access": "public", "pages": 15, "description": null, "source": null, "created_at": "Sun, 24 Apr 2011 15:50:19 +0000", "updated_at": "Mon, 25 Apr 2011 15:12:53 +0000", "canonical_url": "http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/86275-isn-10015-abd-al-rahim-al-nashiri-jtf-gtmo.html", "resources": { "pdf": "http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/86275/isn-10015-abd-al-rahim-al-nashiri-jtf-gtmo.pdf", "text": "http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/86275/isn-10015-abd-al-rahim-al-nashiri-jtf-gtmo.txt", "thumbnail": "http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/86275/pages/isn-10015-abd-al-rahim-al-nashiri-jtf-gtmo-p1-thumbnail.gif", "search": "http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/86275/search.json?q={query}", "page": { "text": "http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/86275/pages/isn-10015-abd-al-rahim-al-nashiri-jtf-gtmo-p{page}.txt", "image": "http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/86275/pages/isn-10015-abd-al-rahim-al-nashiri-jtf-gtmo-p{page}-{size}.gif" } } }, ... ]} Look at documents[0].resources.text: curl http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/86275/isn-10015-abd-al-rahim-al-nashiri-jtf-gtmo.txt There you go. Now go build that tree and report back. :-)
ck2 15y ago
the document dump sheds light on cases of accidental detentions of innocent or seemingly harmless men, including an Afghan shepherd who spent three years at Gitmo after being arrested near the scene of a roadside explosion
- cookiecaper 15y ago
  This was the most surprising part to me. I've read through a handful of the files and only a few of them seem to have any connection to anything useful; most were just caught up in "wrong place, wrong time" happenstances, like crossing the border into Pakistan on the heels of some "suspicious Arabs". Most of these guys end up being recommended for release, but from my sample it was at least the better part of a year and often ~2 years before that would happen. Think of the wives and children left at home, almost definitely without any means wherewith to support themselves, while their father was black bagged for some frivolous reason.
earl 15y ago
Congrats America. We officially torture randoms (some Afghans were given up to the equivalent of a year's salary to turn folks in; quite a nice way of getting rid of some SOB and getting paid). We also violate our laws and constitution, then sit around and circle jerk over whether dunking someone's head under water a couple hundred times until he's just this side of drowning is torture or not. Then, because it's definitely not torture, the cia deletes the videos. Oh, and apparently we now do indefinite detention as well, without legal representation except in front of a kangaroo court, maybe, eventually. Finally, now that we definitely know some people were innocent... we leave them to rot in a cell in Guantanamo. Good job.
- omouse 15y ago
  ...really? really? You've forgotten about Abu Grahib and all the extraditions to other countries that practice torture?
  - jrockway 15y ago
    Sarcasm.
- hugh3 15y ago
  This is why I'm going to vote for Obama in 2008!
  - jbooth 15y ago
    In fairness, his justice department made a serious effort to transfer some gitmo people to the US justice system, but there was an opportunist shitstorm over it, and close to no principled liberals/libertarians who stood up and called out the shitstormers.
    - Afton 15y ago
      "Fair trials to those we have an open and shut case against! Continued detention and possible military trials for anyone else" doesn't sound like a slogan I can get behind.
alexqgb 15y ago
The New Yorker's Amy Davidson did a really good write-up on this. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2011/04/wikileaks-the-uses-of-guantanamo.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2011/04/wiki... The Hindu takes the prize for the most blistering, incandescent (and richly deserved) attack on the US Administration. http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/article1767369.ece http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/article1767369.ec... And Al Jazeera hosts some especially pointed commentary about what's NOT included in the leaks. http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/04/2011425182559745235.html http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/04/201142... tl;dr: Between them, Clinton and Bush amassed an odious and vile legacy of extrajudicial policy. Obama is too scared of House Republicans to say so, has no way to deal with them effectively, and cannot counter their political threats. Now that the story has gotten ahead of the Presidency, America is (quite fairly) getting slapped around the world for being stupidly violent, prone to extreme over-reaction, and disturbingly lawless.

262 points by dsplittgerber 15y ago

Don't miss the detainee population visualizations put together by the NYT with help from CoffeeScript/Underscore/Backbone wizard Jeremy Ashkenas: http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo

oinksoft 15y ago
How is he a "wizard"? His personal site seems to feature graphics libraries.
- southpolesteve 15y ago
  He is the primary author of Coffeescript: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script I am not sure, but I believe he also has authored or contributed to the others.
  - ellisd 15y ago
    Author of backbone.js and underscore.js as well.
- ez77 15y ago
  Yeah, he's the kind of guy who is too busy getting things done to work on a personal site. Still, I find it amazing that he still manages to make some comments here from time to time.
jashkenas 15y ago
The Guantánamo Docket is a relaunch/redesign of an NYT project from 3 years ago. Andrei Scheinkman, Alan McLean, and Archie Tse of the Times, and Margot Williams of NPR, all deserve far more credit for making it happen under an impossible deadline.
- dpritchett 15y ago
  A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.
rhizome 15y ago
I wouldn't brag about an affiliation to the NYT on this story, they're acting to undercut its significance. The reason why the WL dox came out last night is that Domscheit leaked them to the NYT (the NYT was not a primary recipient) and the NYT was trying to steal WL's thunder. Notice that the NYT had five stories published within a couple of hours, each multiple pages long. They were already ready to go, and notice the hawk-serving angle (recidivism) on all of them. No, I wouldn't brag on his behalf, as nice as the applet is.

blhack 15y ago

Is this still part of the Bradley Manning leak?

killerdark 15y ago
I don't think so. Manning leaked cables and somewhat classified documents from/to US embassies. These documents are internal US Department of Defense documents.
- pemulis 15y ago
  He also (allegedly) leaked the Iraq and Afghanistan war documents, including the Collateral Murder video. So, assuming he is a Wikileaks source, he had access to a wide range of DoD files in addition to State Department files. The thing is, Manning didn't go into detail about any Gitmo files when chatting with Adrian Lamo, and, according to the Nation's Wikileaks pointsman Greg Mitchell, there were rumors that Wikileaks had secret Gitmo files before the alleged leaking from Manning took place. http://www.thenation.com/blog/160135/wikileaks-blog-guant%C3%A1namo-files http://www.thenation.com/blog/160135/wikileaks-blog-guant%C3... Remember, too, that Wikileaks released Gitmo's "Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures" way back in 2007. This leak could have come from anybody at any time. My feeling is that this was probably someone other than Manning, though I obviously don't have any real evidence to support that.
  - fleitz 15y ago
    Remember that Adrian Lamo was on the FBI radar before producing these chat logs, it could well be that he dealt with the FBI by producing chat logs that implicate someone else. It wouldn't exactly be the first time someone has lied to the FBI to get a reduced sentence, or avoid prosecution. We also know that the US gov't engages in torture to extract confessions so you should be skeptical of anything anyone who has been in US custody says. It's not just middle easterners, Canadian citizens have been tortured under US auspices.
    - pemulis 15y ago

mrcharles 15y ago

I was hoping the data would be in a text format so that I could build a tree of blame -- so basically you could see exactly how 'information' from someone who may not be giving accurate information impacted future prisoners. Sadly, it's all just embedded PDF files.

burgerbrain 15y ago
OCR it. It sounds like an interesting thing to look at.
- mrcharles 15y ago
  I thought about that, but given that I'd only need a tiny bit of info, and OCR being (potentially) prone to error, at that point it would probably be easier to just manually enter the information I'd need. But I'm lazy.
conesus 15y ago
It's all part of DocumentCloud, which means API access to the text of all that Guantanamo data. See how easy this can be: curl http://www.documentcloud.org/api/search.json?q=group:nytimes "total": 2821, "page": 1, "per_page": 10, "q": "group:nytimes", "documents": [{ "id": "86275-isn-10015-abd-al-rahim-al-nashiri-jtf-gtmo", "title": "ISN 10015 - Abd al Rahim al Nashiri - JTF-GTMO Detainee Assessment", "access": "public", "pages": 15, "description": null, "source": null, "created_at": "Sun, 24 Apr 2011 15:50:19 +0000", "updated_at": "Mon, 25 Apr 2011 15:12:53 +0000", "canonical_url": "http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/86275-isn-10015-abd-al-rahim-al-nashiri-jtf-gtmo.html", "resources": { "pdf": "http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/86275/isn-10015-abd-al-rahim-al-nashiri-jtf-gtmo.pdf", "text": "http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/86275/isn-10015-abd-al-rahim-al-nashiri-jtf-gtmo.txt", "thumbnail": "http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/86275/pages/isn-10015-abd-al-rahim-al-nashiri-jtf-gtmo-p1-thumbnail.gif", "search": "http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/86275/search.json?q={query}", "page": { "text": "http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/86275/pages/isn-10015-abd-al-rahim-al-nashiri-jtf-gtmo-p{page}.txt", "image": "http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/86275/pages/isn-10015-abd-al-rahim-al-nashiri-jtf-gtmo-p{page}-{size}.gif" } } }, ... ]} Look at documents[0].resources.text: curl http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/86275/isn-10015-abd-al-rahim-al-nashiri-jtf-gtmo.txt There you go. Now go build that tree and report back. :-)

ck2 15y ago

the document dump sheds light on cases of accidental detentions of innocent or seemingly harmless men, including an Afghan shepherd who spent three years at Gitmo after being arrested near the scene of a roadside explosion

cookiecaper 15y ago
This was the most surprising part to me. I've read through a handful of the files and only a few of them seem to have any connection to anything useful; most were just caught up in "wrong place, wrong time" happenstances, like crossing the border into Pakistan on the heels of some "suspicious Arabs". Most of these guys end up being recommended for release, but from my sample it was at least the better part of a year and often ~2 years before that would happen. Think of the wives and children left at home, almost definitely without any means wherewith to support themselves, while their father was black bagged for some frivolous reason.

earl 15y ago

Congrats America. We officially torture randoms (some Afghans were given up to the equivalent of a year's salary to turn folks in; quite a nice way of getting rid of some SOB and getting paid). We also violate our laws and constitution, then sit around and circle jerk over whether dunking someone's head under water a couple hundred times until he's just this side of drowning is torture or not. Then, because it's definitely not torture, the cia deletes the videos. Oh, and apparently we now do indefinite detention as well, without legal representation except in front of a kangaroo court, maybe, eventually. Finally, now that we definitely know some people were innocent... we leave them to rot in a cell in Guantanamo. Good job.

omouse 15y ago
...really? really? You've forgotten about Abu Grahib and all the extraditions to other countries that practice torture?
- jrockway 15y ago
  Sarcasm.
hugh3 15y ago
This is why I'm going to vote for Obama in 2008!
- jbooth 15y ago
  In fairness, his justice department made a serious effort to transfer some gitmo people to the US justice system, but there was an opportunist shitstorm over it, and close to no principled liberals/libertarians who stood up and called out the shitstormers.
  - Afton 15y ago
    "Fair trials to those we have an open and shut case against! Continued detention and possible military trials for anyone else" doesn't sound like a slogan I can get behind.

alexqgb 15y ago

The New Yorker's Amy Davidson did a really good write-up on this. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2011/04/wikileaks-the-uses-of-guantanamo.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2011/04/wiki... The Hindu takes the prize for the most blistering, incandescent (and richly deserved) attack on the US Administration. http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/article1767369.ece http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/article1767369.ec... And Al Jazeera hosts some especially pointed commentary about what's NOT included in the leaks. http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/04/2011425182559745235.html http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/04/201142... tl;dr: Between them, Clinton and Bush amassed an odious and vile legacy of extrajudicial policy. Obama is too scared of House Republicans to say so, has no way to deal with them effectively, and cannot counter their political threats. Now that the story has gotten ahead of the Presidency, America is (quite fairly) getting slapped around the world for being stupidly violent, prone to extreme over-reaction, and disturbingly lawless.