Reporters are not allowed to speak with interrogators or anyone else who deals with intelligence at Gitmo. The only testimony I hear is from General Geoffrey Miller, the task-force commander. "We are developing information of enormous value to the nation," says Miller, a slight, pugnacious man said to be a strict disciplinarian. "We have an enormously thorough process that has very high resolution and clarity. We think we're fighting not only to save and protect our families, but your families also. I think of Gitmo as the counterterrorism-interrogation battle lab."

But Miller's background is in artillery, not intelligence, and senior intelligence officials with long experience in counterterrorism, who spoke to Vanity Fair on condition of anonymity, question his assessment.

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General Miller makes it clear that he does not have access to staff of this [high] caliber. Seven out of 10 of the interrogators working in his "joint interrogation group" are reservists, and they come to Camp Delta straight from a 25-day course at Fort Huachuca. "They're all young people, but they're really committed to winning the mission," Miller says. "Intelligence is a young person's game-you've got to be flexible."

Some seasoned intelligence officials disagree. "Generally, the new hires apprentice in the booths with more experienced guys," says one. "I certainly know of no one at Gitmo having the opportunity or the luxury to be able to prepare an interview for three months." Another had met some of Miller's interrogators. "They were rookies, and none were too keen on the process down there," he says. They knew that any seemingly insignificant tidbit might later turn out to be important, but in general "they just didn't feel that the process was going anywhere fast."

According to General Miller, Gitmo's importance is growing with amazing rapidity: "Last month we gained six times as much intelligence as we did in January 2003. I'm talking about high-value intelligence here, distributed round the world."

Gisli Gudjonsson, a professor at London's Institute of Psychiatry, is arguably the world's leading authority in this field. "The longer people are detained, the harsher the conditions, and the worse the lack of a support system, the greater the risk that what they say will be unreliable," he explains. Sometimes one suspect will supply the names of others, who will then in turn confess. Each will appear to corroborate the others' statements, when in fact all are false. This is what happened in the case of the Guildford Four, the subject of Jim Sheridan's movie In the Name of the Father. They were wrongly jailed in 1974 for blowing up two pubs in England and spent 15 years in prison before the British authorities admitted their mistake. "The first thing an interrogator should acknowledge is that you may get false information from someone who is vulnerable."

General Miller, however, sees no cause for concern. "I believe we understand what the truth is. We are very, very good at interrogation... As many of our detainees have realized that what they did was wrong, they have begun to give us information that helps us win the global war on terror."

Spies and psychiatrists may have their doubts, but Donald Rumsfeld is convinced that even the mere foot soldiers imprisoned at Gitmo are "among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth." All, he has said, "were involved in an effort to kill thousands of Americans."

Yet since 2002, when these claims were made, 64 of these "vicious killers" have been released, all after many months' detention. John Sifton, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, has traced and interviewed some of them in Afghanistan. They are all, he says, "the most extreme cases of mistaken identity, simply the wrong guys: a farmer, a taxi driver and all his passengers-people with absolutely no connection with the Taliban or terrorism." Several were victims of bounty hunters, who were paid in dollars after abducting "terrorists" and denouncing them to the U.S. military.

BRIGADIER GENERAL MARK KIMMITT, DEPUTY DIRECTOR COALITION OPERATIONS, IRAQ: It was apparent that many of the units that had not been defeated in the war were starting to act up. We started seeing some problems out around the town of Falluja and we were getting a number of security internees into the detention facilities. Large numbers. There was not an expectation during the war that we would have this large number of internees and when it became apparent that this was a process that we would have to start up, and there were some challenges at that time, we called in the expert. The expert was Major General Geoff Miller.