Judicial Watch, a conservative foundation that seeks to improve government transparency, has obtained two important Guantanamo-related documents from the Department of Defense via a Freedom of Information Act request. One of the documents is a draft presentation dated February 4, 2004. Reading through it, one cannot help but be struck by how different the presentation’s narrative is from so much of the public discourse.

The press and many commentators treat Guantanamo like a law enforcement problem. The claim that detainees are “held without charge,” as if they were arrested as mere criminals, has been repeated time and again. The truth is that Guantanamo was never a prison or some sort of criminal justice facility. The U.S. government never intended to try most of the detainees in any court. Guantanamo always has been, and continues to be, a military detention facility. As such, its chief purposes were to remove jihadists from the battlefield or any environment where they may pose a threat, and to collect intelligence from them.