The majority of the media’s coverage of Guantánamo has been decidedly one-sided. Consider, as the latest example, the New York Times’s account of Muhammad Saad Iqbal’s story, which was published on Tuesday (“An Ex-Detainee of the U.S. Describes a 6-Year Ordeal”). Iqbal was a detainee at Guantánamo from 2002 until late last year when he was transferred to Pakistan. The Times‘s version is based almost entirely on Iqbal’s word and, importantly, ignores most of the troubling allegations the U.S. government made against him. You would never know from reading the Times‘s article that Iqbal was accused of plotting to kill a U.S. official in Indonesia. There is no hint of the fact that Iqbal himself admitted to consorting with terrorists. Instead, Iqbal is portrayed as an obvious innocent who was wrongly tortured.

As with nearly all terrorism-related matters, there is ambiguity. The full truth of Iqbal’s life may be impossible to piece together. Nevertheless, let us consider the available evidence found in the U.S. government’s unclassified files, which were produced online by the Department of Defense and then republished by the Times in its own online database. Despite being freely available, the Times ignored most of the files’ contents when reporting on Iqbal.