The readers' editor on… WikiLeaks and the release of sensitive information
The story of WikiLeaks and the publication of thousands of confidential US military and diplomatic files leaked to that organisation has been extraordinary on so many levels. Inevitably it has become the basis of a number of books and a Hollywood film is on the way. The publication of the Guantánamo files is the latest significant chapter.
Disclosure of the 759 military dossiers, known as detainee assessment briefs, was accompanied by yet more drama as rival groups of news organisations sought to get their edited versions out first.
These files tell, through the eyes of the US military, the story of the inmates of Guantánamo Bay, where hundreds of alleged Islamist terrorists from around the world have been taken for interrogation by US forces.
They reveal that the aim of detention appears to be more connected with intelligence-gathering rather than containing dangerous terrorists. Much of the material in the files gathered by their jailers appears flawed and just two inmates have informed on a quarter of all the other inmates that have passed through the camp.
The files are generally regarded as the last significant tranche of material from the mass that was allegedly leaked by US intelligence analyst Bradley Manning to WikiLeaks. The earlier four were the release of the Apache helicopter video showing the apparent casual killing of a dozen Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists; the Afghan war logs; the Iraq war logs; and the US embassy cables.The existence of the Guantánamo files was known by all those journalists that had hitherto co-operated on both sets of war logs and the embassy cables. On these earlier series WikiLeaks co-operated with the Guardian, which brought together a group of newspapers, including the New York Times, to assess and edit the material. This time was slightly different following the well-documented differences between Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and the Guardian and the NYT.
Assange now works with a different group of news organisations in the US and UK, replacing the Guardian with the Daily Telegraph and the New York Times with the Washington Post and the McClatchy group of newspapers. That group was working on the material and planned to release the files soon. However these were also obtained - not from WikiLeaks - by the NYT.
The New York Times offered to share the files with the Guardian and National Public Radio in the US. The plan was to run the story in the week of 2-9 May, but this was brought forward to 27 April. At the Guardian, a team of seven, which rose to 14 or so over the Easter weekend, had been working on the files for nearly three weeks when, around mid-morning on 22 April, a colleague accidentally put up one of the stories from the files on the web. It was only up for one minute 20 seconds before it was taken down, but two people had accessed the story and it had been indexed on Google.
If the cat was out of the bag, the NYT group felt they had to publish as soon as possible; Monday 25 April it had to be.
Throughout the Easter weekend the team worked flat out to get the package of material ready. An added complication was that publication had to be synchronised by all three groups and the Times, who had got the files first, reasonably wanted to publish at midnight in the US on the night of 24/25 April. This meant the Guardian could not publish until 5am, five hours later on the 25 April, in print and online, therefore early editions of Monday's paper could not carry the Guantánamo files. Ten pages of material prepared for early editions of the Guardian that day would have to be replaced for the fourth and fifth editions with the first full day's Guantánamo coverage. The rival group of news organisations got wind of the plan and just after 1am UK time on Monday 25 April - a full four hours before the Guardian's deadline for publication – ran a story from the files. This triggered publication by all.
In my opinion the Guantánamo coverage has been the investigation that has most tested the decision-making process around the disclosure of information that may put at risk the lives of people named in the leaked documents. However, the Guardian has received only two letters of complaint about the investigation. The Guardian's deputy editor Ian Katz said: "There was a lot of debate with the NYT about the redaction policy and our position was identical to the NYT."
No detainee would be identified who had informed on another detainee, with two exceptions: Mohammed Basardah and Abu Zubaydah. Both these men's activities as informants had been well documented and were therefore already in the public domain.
The central ethical issue over identification came with a third man, named in the files as Adil Hadi al Jazairi Bin Hamlily. In the case of Hamlily, the Guardian has been criticised by his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, for using material from the files that disclosed that he worked for MI6. Stafford Smith denies that his client has ever done so.
Katz says that before publication the editorial team took the view that, while the Guardian does not generally identify serving MI6 officers, Hamlily's work was in the past, reaching back more than 10 years. In addition, he had, according to the files, double-crossed the British and was an active terrorist during that time.
It was also felt that the extent to which MI6 had penetrated Islamist terrorist groups prior to 9/11 was a legitimate issue of public interest.
However, Hamlily's lawyer believes that this has clearly put him at risk. Hamlily is now back in Algeria. Katz says that the team was unaware at the time that Hamlily had a lawyer, but had they known this they would have taken into account his concerns over anonymisation.
This is complicated further by the fact that WikiLeaks is publishing the bulk of the documents unedited, so whatever the Guardian decided might have seemed irrelevant. "If we had had the opportunity to speak to Clive Stafford Smith, we would have considered anonymising Hamlily," said Katz.
A lawyer has made representations on behalf of another detainee as to the risks if his client's name is published, and the Guardian has decided not to identify him.
To date, there has been no evidence of a single death connected to the publication of any of the WikiLeaks files since publication began last year. This doesn't mean it won't happen; it will be a long time before a considered judgment can be made about the effect of the publication of the WikiLeaks files. For instance, Guardian editors have been wary about claims that the Arab spring is a direct result. If Katz took one single thing away from immersing himself in the files over the last nine months what would it be?
"It's a healthy distrust of supposed intelligence, it's really surprising how wrong some of this material has been. It is deeply flawed and bordering on incompetence."