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NEW YORK The Department of Defense must release documents containing the identities of detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who were transferred or released or who suffered mistreatment by their handlers or other detainees, a judge ruled Wednesday.

In ruling in a case brought by The Associated Press, U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff said the government cannot keep the names secret on the grounds that it protects the privacy of detainees.

"The public interest in disclosing government malfeasance is well-established," the judge wrote in saying that the AP had demonstrated the need for the information.

David A. Schulz, who argued the case for the AP, called the judge's decision "a resounding victory for the public's right to know."

He said the identities of between 50 and 100 detainees who were ordered to be transferred or released from Guantanamo Bay after Jan. 1, 2005, will allow reporters to attempt to verify whether the government's account of events is accurate.

"The Department of Defense has made it virtually impossible for anyone to check the accuracy or thoroughness of what is going on in Guantanamo," Schulz said. "The public is supposed to be able to determine these things for itself."

Schulz said the judge also ordered the government to turn over the identities in eight files reporting investigations of allegations of abuse of detainees by military personnel and fewer than a dozen probes of abuse of detainees by other detainees.

The government will have two months to decide whether to appeal the ruling. It had no immediate comment Wednesday, spokeswoman Lauren McDonough said.

Since the Guantanamo prison opened in January 2002, the U.S. has detained more than 750 prisoners there on suspicion of links to Afghanistan's Taliban militia or Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network. More than 450 prisoners remain at Guantanamo; only 10 of them were charged and faced military tribunals, which were ruled illegal in June by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The military publicly identified all the prisoners held at Guantanamo for the first time in May in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the AP. The prisoners came from several dozen countries, and most were captured in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Earlier this year, the judge ordered the Department of Defense to turn over to the AP unredacted copies of transcripts and documents related to 558 military hearings in which detainees were permitted to challenge their incarcerations.

The AP filed Freedom of Information Act lawsuits seeking the documents last year. The government then turned over the transcripts of 558 tribunals but redacted facts about each detainee's identity.

Many of the detainees were captured in Afghanistan. They are from there, the Persian Gulf, Russia and other countries.