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McClatchy Papers article

America's prison for terrorists often held the wrong men
By Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers

Mohammed Akhtiar was washing his hands at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp when fellow prisoners crept up behind him and smashed him in the head with a metal mop squeezer. The assailants knew something the U.S. military didn't — Akhtiar was no terrorist bent on attacking the United States, but an active opponent of Afghanistan's al Qaida-allied Taliban regime.

Guantanamo was supposed to house the "worst of the worst." But a McClatchy investigation that included interviews with 66 former detainees on three continents found that dozens of the men imprisoned there — and maybe hundreds — were no threat at all, and some in the U.S. government knew it.