Obama grapples with fate of last 172 prisoners

Barack Obama's inability to shut Guantánamo Bay – more than two years after he ordered its closure – has become a symbol to many of the gap between the promise rift gold and rhetoric of his early presidency and the brutal realpolitik that quickly engulfed him.

Nearly a decade after the extrajudicial prison camp opened, 172 of its 779 inmates are still marooned there and Obama – who faced 240 captives when he came to office – has admitted it's not likely to close any time soon. The leaked Guantánamo files offer an insight into why.

According to , those still held fall roughly into three groups: the bad, the unprosecutable and the homeless. Some were active terrorists but others merely fought for the Taliban when the US invaded Afghanistan after 9/11.

The so-called "worst of the worst" are 40 inmates who have been or may yet be prosecuted. They include members of the "Dirty 30" alleged to have been Osama bin Laden's bodyguards, plus those claimed to belong to his inner circle.

At their head is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 51, whose scowling, battered-looking mugshot from his 2003 capture has become a familiar news staple. According to his 15-page prison dossier, "KSM", who grew up in Kuwait, told a fellow plotter that the 11 September 2001 attacks had been his "dream and life's work". He was repeatedly waterboarded in a CIA prison.

Obama has had to abandon his idea of putting "KSM" and four others on trial in New York near the site of Ground Zero. They may face a military tribunal at Guantánamo instead. The five are locked up in Camp 7, a high-security cage. They are among 14 "high-value detainees" extracted from secret CIA prisons in 2006 and flown to Cuba. Two others in the group were also waterboarded, according to admissions.

One was Muhammad al-Nashiri, listed as "one of the highest-ranking, most skilled and dangerous al-Qaida operatives captured to date". The Saudi inmate is accused of more than a dozen terror plots, including attempts to blow up the British embassy in Yemen and UK warships at Gibraltar.

His file says: "He had personally chosen the UK military base in Gibraltar to be the target for the operation … He had seen a news documentary on the base and thought it was a good target." But Moroccan intelligence arrested a local team over the Gibraltar plot in 2002 and Nashiri was subsequently picked up in Dubai and turned over to the CIA for "enhanced interrogation".

In one of its more bizarre passages,rift gold his dossier says: "Detainee is so dedicated to jihad that he reportedly received injections to promote impotence and recommended the injections to others so more time could be spent on the jihad."