An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men ? and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds ? whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.

McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials ? primarily in Afghanistan ? and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.

This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.

The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners...

Army Spc. Eric Barclais, who was a military intelligence interrogator at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan from September 2002 through January 2003, told military investigators in sworn testimony that "We recommended lots of folks be released from (Bagram), but they were not. I believe some people ended up at (Guantanamo) that had no business being sent there."

"You have to understand some folks were detained because they got turned in by neighbors or family members who were feuding with them," Barclais said. "Yes, they had weapons. Everyone had weapons. Some were Soviet-era and could not even be fired."

A former Pentagon official told McClatchy that he was shocked at times by the backgrounds of men held at Guantanamo.

" 'Captured with weapon near the Pakistan border?' " the official said. "Are you kidding me?"

"The screening, the understanding of who we had was horrible," he said. "That's why we had so many useless people at Gitmo."...

The majority of the detainees taken to Guantanamo came into U.S. custody indirectly, from Afghan troops, warlords, mercenaries and Pakistani police who often were paid cash by the number and alleged importance of the men they handed over. Foot soldiers brought in hundreds of dollars, but commanders were worth thousands. Because of the bounties ? advertised in fliers that U.S. planes dropped all over Afghanistan in late 2001 ? there was financial incentive for locals to lie about the detainees' backgrounds. Only 33 percent of the former detainees ? 22 out of 66 ? whom McClatchy interviewed were detained initially by U.S. forces. Of those 22, 17 were Afghans who'd been captured around mid-2002 or later as part of the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, a fight that had more to do with counter-insurgency than terrorism.

The Supreme Court, by a 5-4 margin, determined that neither the president, nor the president plus Congress, could strip detainees at Guantanamo of the ancient right to habeas corpus via the 2006 Military Commissions Act (PDF). This is pretty legal and technical, and the concrete ramifications are still baffling to just about everyone. Judging by the tone of Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent, however, you'd think that Justice Anthony Kennedy and his colleagues in the majority not only released Hamdan and his buddies from their imprisonment at Guantanamo, but also armed them with a rocket launcher and paid their collective train fare to Philadelphia. "The game of bait-and-switch that today's opinion plays upon the Nation's Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed," Scalia wrote. He concluded his dissent with this warning: "The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today."

And in the end, this is the fight between the majority and the dissent: Kennedy and the justices who signed his opinion (David Souter, John Paul Stevens, Stephen Breyer, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) are worried about the very real risk of a lifetime of mistaken imprisonment. And the dissenters (Scalia, Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito) are worried about the risk of ... what? Not an actual mistaken release, but a day in court. The big threat here is of federal court review that may?somewhere far down the line, and at the moment entirely hypothetically?result in the release of a detainee or (more attenuated still) the disclosure of a piece of hypothetical information that could help the terrorists in their fight against us...

Justice Scalia, meanwhile, is banking on someday cashing in the "I told you so" chit he wrote for himself today. In the event that one of the prisoners who has suffered years of abuse and mistreatment at Guantanamo is someday actually released following a federal habeas proceeding and blows something up, Scalia wants to be able to point at Justice Kennedy as the man who let him go. Or if in the course of a someday trial, a piece of evidence is leaked that somehow strengthens a terrorist group, he can blame Kennedy for his blind faith in the federal courts. The dissenters here are unwilling to bear the risk that any of the 270 men at Guantanamo?among them people who were grabbed as teens and others who claim actual innocence?go free. And, indeed, reasonable people can disagree about whether that risk is too much to bear. But Scalia and his dissenting friends today made clear that this is not the risk to which they most object. What they cannot accept is the risk that their brothers and sisters on the federal bench?with decades of judicial experience and the Constitution to light their way?might now do what they are trained to do: hear cases.