From the Sydney Morning Herald.

THE Guantanamo Bay dossiers on the Australians Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks, released by WikiLeaks, demonstrate two things. One is that, if tortured sufficiently or even indefinitely incarcerated, most people will eventually break, agreeing to admit to almost anything to avoid further pain. The second is that interrogators, if freed of the restraints imposed by common decency, the rules of evidence and judicial oversight, tend to believe what they want to believe of their captives.

It is now clear that allegations on which the two Australians were held at the detention centre at the US naval base in Cuba were based on evidence that was often at best flimsy or unverified or, worse, tainted or plain wrong. A 2004 secret document from Guantanamo’s commanding officer acknowledged that Habib’s confessions while being held in Egyptian custody before being brought to Guantanamo – they included a plot to hijack a Qantas plane – had been made under ”extreme duress”. By Habib’s account, this was a euphemism for sustained and brutal torture.

And from ABC’s The Drum comes this commentary.

One local example is The Australian columnist Chris Kenny, failed Liberal politician and former chief of staff to former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. During a Twitter conversation on Wednesday with Paul Barrett, a former Secretary of Australian Departments of Defence and Primary Industries & Energy, Kenny wrote, “You’re arguing to set free people who have murdered thousands” when Barrett asked why the US refused to conduct fair and open trials for individuals who had never faced justice.

In Kenny’s worldview, the American military has smeared hundreds of Muslims as terrorists and that’s good enough for him. The fact that the Wikileaks file shows the vast majority of Guantanamo Bay detainees had no connection to September 11 or terrorism can be ignored.

…

It took one of the world’s more diligent and un-embedded journalists on Guantanamo Bay inmates, Andy Worthington, to unpack the Wikileaks revelations and highlight the decade of ignoring legal precedent for the Cuban and American black hole down which countless men were tortured and housed.