Reporters and editors of The New York Times are answering readers’ questions about “The Guantánamo Files,” The Times’s coverage of a trove of more than 700 classified files, obtained last year by the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks, about past and present detainees at the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The documents were made available to The Times by another source on the condition of anonymity.
Questions may be submitted by e-mail to askthetimes@nytimes.com.

The Geneva Conventions
Q. Did any of the files show the military engaging in actions that violate the Geneva conventions? Was anyone harmed at the expense of the new information?
— John
A. The documents are assessments of each detainee, and they say almost nothing about the treatment of detainees, good or bad. They are totally focused on intelligence about what the detainees had allegedly done in the past and what danger they might pose if released. There is very little about the harsh treatment of some detainees early in the prison’s history, or the implications of that treatment for the veracity of what they told interrogators at the time.
— Scott Shane
Hardened Fighters
Q. How many of the detainees have histories going back to the Soviet-Afghan war?
— Barbara McKown
A. The majority of the detainees who were brought to Guantánamo are far too young to have fought the Soviets in the 1980s. Many of the non-Afghan Arabs who were swept up along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in late 2001 were in their 20s and had gone there from their home countries — most often Saudi Arabia or Yemen — within the past couple of years. However, there are also a handful of veteran jihadists with long and storied histories — not just the Afghan-Soviet war in the 1980s, but also war zones like Bosnia and Chechnya.
— Charlie Savage
Purpose of the Files
Q. What use did the United States put all this information to, or was it just archived somewhere?
— Malena Marchan
A.These detainee assessments were prepared between 2002 and 2009 to summarize what the government knew about each detainee. They were an important part of the decision-making concerning which detainees could be sent home or transferred to other countries — 600 of 779 to date — and which should be kept at Guantanamo — 172 are still there. The Obama administration has since performed new reviews of each of the remaining detainees, but those new documents remain secret.
— Scott Shane
Why Not Call It Torture?
Q. The article today says the documents "are largely silent about the use of the harsh interrogation tactics at Guantánamo." Why does The New York Times continue to refuse to call torture by its name?
— Aaron Dome, Chicago
A. Some of the interrogation methods may fit a legal or common-sense definition of torture. Others may not. To refer to the whole range of practices as "torture" would be simply polemical.
— Bill Keller
The Safety of Americans
Q. How do you justify releasing these leaked secret documents, despite our government warning you that doing so may jeopardize the safety of Americans?
— B. Turgidson
A. We redacted or withheld documents that we believed could put lives at risk — Americans or not. For example, we agreed to excise the names of guards or interrogators who could conceivably be targets of reprisals. But a claim of "jeopardizing the safey of Americans" is a slippery slope. Some people would argue that simply drawing attention to Guantánamo Bay arouses hostility toward Americans. (That argument was made about the photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.) In weighing such concerns, we listen respectfully to the arguments of officials, but we do not surrender our own judgment.
— Bill Keller