By Will Dunham
Washington - The Pentagon released under court order on Friday a partial listing of names and nationalities of the nearly 500 foreign terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, but withheld data on the rest.
Starting with the arrival from Afghanistan of the first group of 20 shackled and masked detainees on January 11, 2002, the United States has never released the names and nationalities of all the prisoners at the controversial camp.
While incomplete, the new list was the most extensive made public by the government to date.
The Pentagon released at 6.40pm (23h40 GMT) on Friday more than 5 000 pages of documents relating to hearings conducted at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by military panels reviewing the cases of detainees.
Curt Goering, a senior official with Amnesty International USA, called upon the Pentagon to release a complete list of detainees at Guantanamo as well as at facilities in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
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"It is like kicking and screaming and pulling teeth to get any piece of information" on detainees from the Pentagon, Goering said.
Bryan Whitman, a senior Pentagon spokesperson, said the documents contained files on about 317 detainees. He said there are about 490 detainees currently at Guantanamo.
The detainees' names, often without their nationalities clearly stated, were strewn throughout the voluminous documents, making a precise count difficult.
Only 10 of the detainees at Guantanamo have been charged with a crime, and human rights activists have condemned the indefinite detentions and the prisoners' lack of legal rights. United Nations rights investigators have called for the closure of the prison.
US District Judge Jed Rakoff last month ordered the Pentagon to release transcripts of detainee hearings by Friday as part of a lawsuit filed by the Associated Press.
Because the lawsuit did not seek data on detainees who refused to take part in the military hearings, Whitman said, their names and nationalities would not be released.
Asked why the Pentagon did not release a complete list, Whitman said, "There is a concern that there could be potential harm to the detainees if personal information such as their name was a matter of public record."
Rights lawyers said the Pentagon deserved little credit.
"If Judge Rakoff had not ordered the release of these names, the department would never have released them," said Bill Goodman, legal director for the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents numerous detainees.
"And that just adds to the levels of secrecy that surround the detentions at Guantanamo, the lack of transparency and the overall absence of anything that would resemble what Americans have gotten used to describing as justice or due process."
The documents detail testimony by detainees, describing how and where they were caught, what kind of guerrilla training they had and some of their beliefs.
For example, a document about a detainee named Nayif Abdallah al Nukhaylan said, "Detainee stated he despised al-Qaeda, who he believes were very dangerous, and they lied to him. Detainee believes al-Qaeda prevented him from going home and had stolen his passport, which he believed they would use in some kind of operation."
It also said he told an American guard, "Sergeant I will kill you."
A document on a detainee named Abdallah Salih Ali Al Ajmi said he went AWOL from the Kuwaiti military to travel to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban.
"Upon arrival at GTMO (Guantanamo), Al Ajmi has been constantly in trouble. Al Ajmi's overall behaviour has been aggressive and non-compliant, and he has resided in GTMO's disciplinary blocks throughout his detention," the document stated.
The United States previously has identified some detainees in legal documents, while the names of numerous others have been made public by their relatives or lawyers.
The Pentagon says the detainees are treated humanely and not tortured. The United States classifies the men as enemy combatants and not prisoners of war, thus denying them rights afforded POWs under the Geneva Conventions.
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