For years, the U.S. has cast the captives at the Navy base prison camps in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as dangerous terrorists, and many may be. There's Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who's bragged that he masterminded the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
There's Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, who may stand trial soon on charges of orchestrating the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 American sailors off the coast of Yemen. But no comprehensive list has been available of who's currently being held at Guantanamo. Until now.
Using some 750 secret military-intelligence files obtained by the WikiLeaks website, and comparing them with other public documents and interviews with lawyers and U.S. officials, McClatchy has been able to give names, and frequently faces, to the 172 men who are still at Guantanamo nearly 10 years after the prison camps opened and more than two years after Obama ordered them closed.
About half, like the Malaysian, who's also known as Zubair, are designated to face terrorism trials or to be held indefinitely as war prisoners. But the other half were at worst what a senior government official called "low-level, ill-trained volunteers" whom the Obama administration would like to let go.