Wikipedia:WikiProject Terrorism/Duration of the captives' detention

We now have the information necessary to have almost all the Guantanamo captives' articles state when they arrived, when they left, and how long they were held in Guantanamo. In the cases of the captives' who are still there, we have the information required to say how they have been held there, so far.

The DoD published departure dates for all the captives who left detention prior to 2008-10-08. Since then there have been press releases, or reasonable equivalent, that offer the departure dates of most of the captives who have left Guantanamo since then. See Timeline of Guantanamo captives' releases and transfers The exceptions are a handful of former captives were given asylum by third countries who have withheld the publication of their names.

We now have several sources for the captives' arrival dates. The human rights group Reprieve got the flight manifests of the planes that transitted to Guantanamo, through Portugese airspace, on their way to Guantanamo. That was most of the captives, so we know most of their arrival dates from those flight manifests. Stephen Grey wrote about these flights in his book Ghost Plane. In addition in March 2007 the limited medical records the DoD published have an "inprocess date". It is filled in for almost all the captives.

On their "Guantanamo dockets" the NYTimes periodically interpolates the duration of captives' stays, on each captives' page. The NYTimes doesn't confirm they draw this info from from the Reprieve stats or the JTF-GTMO medical records.

There was a recent discussion at help desk about whether we should simply quote the NYTimes.

Since that discussion rejected an approach previously tried on some of the articles I would like to see a discussion here of the alternatives. Geo Swan (talk) 19:53, 14 January 2010 (UTC)