Some Gitmo Detainees to Move to Illinois Prison

A prison complex 150 miles from Chicago will house Gitmo detainees, the Obama administration will announce today, according to ABC News.

A senior administration official tells ABC News that on Tuesday the administration will announce that President Obama "has directed that the federal government proceed with the acquisition of the Thomson Correctional Center in Thomson, Illinois to house federal inmates and a limited number of detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."

Thomson Correctional Center is a maximum security prison that opened in 2001 but has never been fully utilized because of state budget issues.

Information from the state of Illinois indicates that Thomson Correctional Center is a Level 1 adult male maximum-security facility comprised of 1,600 cells and eight housing units, none of which are currently used. The facility is on 146 acres and is currently surrounded by a 12-foot exterior fence and 15-foot interior fence -- which includes a dual sided electric stun fence. The cell houses were constructed with pre-cast, reinforced cement walls. The complex also contains a 200-bed minimum-security unit, which has been operational.

"Closing the detention center at Guantanamo is essential to protecting our national security and helping our troops by removing a deadly recruiting tool from the hands of al Qaeda," the official said. "Tomorrow’s announcement is an important step forward as we work to achieve our national security objectives."

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn and Sen. Dick Durbin, two leading officials -- both Democrats -- who have supported the move, will be briefed on the decision Tuesday by administration officials.

Accused 9/11 Mastermind: I Made Up Stories to Stop Torture

Accused al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed testified at a 2007 hearing at Guantanamo Bay that interrogators tortured lies out of him, according to sections of government transcripts released Monday.

"I make up stories," Mohammed said during the hearing.

The Associated Press gives this account:

In broken English, he described an interrogation in which he was asked the location of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

"Where is he? I don't know," Mohammed said. "Then he torture me. Then I said, `Yes, he is in this area or this is al Qaeda which I don't know him.' I said no, they torture me."

During the same military tribunal hearing, Mohammed ticked off a list of 29 terror plots in which he said he participated.

The transcripts were released as part of a lawsuit in which the American Civil Liberties Union is seeking documents and details of the government's terror detainee programs.

Previous accounts of the military tribunal hearings had been made public, but the Obama administration went back and reviewed the still-secret sections and determined that more could be released.

ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner called on the Obama administration to disclose more details, saying the new materials "provide further evidence of brutal torture and abuse in the CIA's interrogation program and demonstrate beyond doubt that this information has been suppressed solely to avoid embarrassment and growing demands for accountability."

NYT Admits Errors in Its A1 Gitmo 'Recidivism' Story

The New York Times has published an Editors' Note that in essence says its front-page story on Guantanamo recidivism written by Elisabeth Bumiller was not accurate in saying that one of seven Gitmo detainees who have been releases have returned to terrorist activities.

Times Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet told TPMmuckraker that it wouldn't have been a Page 1 story if the paper realized the errors that it contained. "It's something that we thought we needed to explain to readers to amplify the story and to correct something we got wrong," Baquet told the website. Given the factual errors, "I'm not sure it would have led the paper" but still believes that the piece was "a legitimate news story.

"I don't think it's a mistake that's comparable to Iraq or the pre-war buildup. I think that's ridiculous. I think that's a ludicrous and politicized comparison. I think we made a mistake and we owned up to it."

Justin Elliot explains the mistake in his TPMmuckraker.com story:

The original story declared: "1 In 7 Detainees Rejoined Jihad, Pentagon Finds." But the story, which ran on the front of the print edition on May 21, was changed online to "Later Terror Link Cited for 1 in 7 Freed Detainees."

TPMmuckraker originally flagged the story's questionable use of "recidivism" and underlying issues about the Pentagon's numbers.

The editors' note, which is pasted in full below, acknowledges use of terms like "rejoined" and "recidivism" "accepted a premise of the report that all the former prisoners had been engaged in terrorism before their detention."

The original formulation of the story -- that one in seven detainees had "returned" to jihad -- was endlessly repeated on cable, picked up on right-wing blogs, and even cited more than once by Dick Cheney.

McClatchy and others have reported on evidence that some detainees may have in fact been radicalized while imprisoned at Gitmo.

Here's the full editors' note:

A front-page article and headline on May 21 reported findings from an unreleased Pentagon report about prisoners who have been transferred abroad from the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The article said that the Pentagon had found about one in seven of former Guantánamo prisoners had "returned to terrorism or other militant activity," or as the headline put it, had "rejoined jihad."

Those phrases accepted a premise of the report that all the former prisoners had been engaged in terrorism before their detention. Because that premise remains unproved, the day the article appeared in the newspaper, editors changed the headline and the first paragraph on the Times Web site to refer to prisoners the report said had engaged in terrorism or militant activity since their release.

The article and headline also conflated two categories of former prisoners. In the Pentagon report, 27 former Guantánamo prisoners were described as having been confirmed as engaging in terrorism, with another 47 suspected of doing so without substantiation. The article should have distinguished between the two categories, to say that about one in 20 of former Guantánamo prisoners described in the Pentagon report were now said to be engaging in terrorism. (The larger share -- about one in seven --applies to the total number described in the report as confirmed or suspected of engaging in terrorism.)