WASHINGTON, Aug 18: No leader of Al Qaeda has been found among the 598 detainees held on a US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday.

The daily said that the failure of US interrogators to identify lieutenants in the network of Osama bin Laden severely restricts the intelligence and military communities’ capacity to better understand and thwart future actions by Al Qaeda.

They are mostly “low and middle-level” fighters, he said, not the “big-time guys” counter-terrorism experts were hoping would aid in the harvesting of valuable information about terror structures and operations.

“Some of these guys literally don’t know the world is round,” another official quoted by the daily said.—AFP