I wish I could say I was surprised

It seems that once again the Bush/Cheney team has been a little loose and fast with their facts. Those that Vice President Dick Cheney has called them "the worst of a very bad lot," the prisoners we hold in Guantanamo may not be that bad after all. And their import to the war on terror is questionable as well.

In interviews, dozens of high-level military, intelligence and law-enforcement officials in the United States, Europe and the Middle East said that contrary to the repeated assertions of senior administration officials, none of the detainees at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay ranked as leaders or senior operatives of Al Qaeda. They said only a relative handful - some put the number at about a dozen, others more than two dozen - were sworn Qaeda members or other militants able to elucidate the organization's inner workings.

While some Guantanamo intelligence has aided terrorism investigations, none of it has enabled intelligence or law-enforcement services to foil imminent attacks, the officials said. Compared with the higher-profile Qaeda operatives held elsewhere by the C.I.A., the Guantanamo detainees have provided only a trickle of intelligence with current value, the officials said. Because nearly all of that intelligence is classified, most of the officials would discuss it only on the condition of anonymity.

"When you have the overall mosaic of all the intelligence picked up all over the world, Guantanamo provided a very small piece of that mosaic," said a senior American official who has reviewed the intelligence in detail. "It's been helpful and valuable in certain areas. Was it the mother lode of intelligence? No."

In September 2002, eight months after the detainees began to arrive in Cuba, a top-secret study by the Central Intelligence Agency raised questions about their significance, suggesting that many of the accused terrorists appeared to be low-level recruits who went to Afghanistan to support the Taliban or even innocent men swept up in the chaos of the war, current and former officials who read the assessment said.

Nearly two years later, military officials said, the evidence against many of the detainees is still so sparse that investigators have been able to deliver cases for military prosecution against only 15 of the suspects, 6 of whom have already been designated as eligible for trial by President Bush. Investigators are now preparing 35 to 40 other cases for the military tribunals, those officials said.

Go read the article for more. Pay particular attention to which techniques of interrogation used elicited the best results. Here's a hint:

Over a series of interrogations that extended into the fall of 2002, the agent slowly built a rapport with Mr. Kahtani, approaching him with respect and restraint, officials said. "He prays with them, he has tea with them, and it works," a senior official said, speaking generally of the agent's approach to terrorist suspects.