Historical Perspective on Guantanamo Bay: The Arrival of the High Value Detainees‪.‬

Detainees were sent to Guantanamo Bay to be exploited for intelligence purposes, not to perfect criminal cases against them. The effort to construct credible criminal cases based upon intelligence was going to be problematic, and it became even more so when President George W. Bush decided in the summer of 2006 to transfer high value detainees from secret Central Intelligence Agency sites, where some were subjected to torture, to military detention at Guantanamo Bay. The former chief prosecutor for the military commissions describes the decision to create "clean teams" of Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and military law enforcement personnel to interview the high value detainees anew at Guantanamo Bay in hopes of separating the criminal prosecution effort from the earlier intelligence gathering phase. The merits of that decision will be tested as President Barack Obama's administration moves forward with the prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other high value detainees. **********