buylotrogold

Repeating
Pentagon Lies on Gitmo Recidivism
by Andy Worthington, February 8, 2010
What is to be done about the
idiocy that has spread, like a poisonous but imperceptible gas, from the
Pentagon to Congress, and is now wafting through the White House,
deranging all it touches? As it travels, this dismal infection transforms
statistical impossibilities into magic numbers, which appear, to the
uninformed observer, to confirm the most shameless lies of former Vice
President Dick Cheney: that Guantánamo was teeming with hardcore
terrorists, who couldn’t wait to “return to the battlefield.”
Only last month,

I tore into the mainstream media for abandoning all its fabled
fact-checking and _object_ivity, when the Pentagon claimed, without
producing any evidence whatsoever, that 1 in 5 prisoners freed from
Guantánamo had “engaged in terrorist activity after their release,” and
these claims were repeated as facts by numerous supposedly reputable
media outlets.
As I explained at the time, this was just the latest installment in a
campaign of misinformation, which, in May last year,

led to humiliation for the New York Times, when its editors
allowed a front-page story to run, claiming that 1 in 7 released
prisoners (74 in total) had “returned to terrorism,” even though only 27
names were provided, and, of those, independent experts could only verify
somewhere between 13 and 20 of them.
Last May, the Pentagon at least provided names, but last month’s
fact-free assertions have now found their way to the White House, and
were repeated on February 1 by John Brennan, the assistant to President
Obama for homeland security and counterterrorism, in a letter to House
Leader Nancy Pelosi, which was

obtained by ABC News
(
PDF).


[T]he Intelligence Community assesses that 20 percent of detainees
transferred from Guantánamo are confirmed or suspected of recidivist
activity. This includes 9.6 percent of detainees who have been confirmed
as having returned to terrorist activities, and 10.4 percent whom the
Intelligence Community suspects, but is not certain, may have engaged in
recidivist activities.
Brennan attempted to use these spurious figures to score points,
asserting that all of the largely unidentified prisoners had been
released by the Bush administration. Defending the Obama administration’s
careful and thorough interagency review of the remaining prisoners’


I want to underscore the fact that all of these cases relate to
detainees released during the previous administration and under the prior
detainee review process. The report indicates no confirmed or suspected
recidivists among detainees transferred during this Administration,
although we recognize the ongoing risk that detainees could engage in
such activity.
Despite this, it frankly beggars belief that a spokesman for an
administration that has pledged to close Guantánamo would publicly cleave
to the kind of wretched propaganda that will make that task all but
impossible.
So who are these approximately 116 men (out of the 532 prisoners released
from Guantánamo under George W. Bush) who have allegedly “engaged in
recidivist activities”?
We know, from earlier Pentagon claims, that this “recidivism” has
included and may well still include publishing houses, the offices of
newspapers, TV studios, and film sets because the Pentagon admitted (in a
press release that was subsequently deleted from the Pentagon’s website,
but is

mirrored here) that it included former prisoners, like the

Tipton Three three young men from the West Midlands who had
appeared in a movie, The
Road to Guantánamo, which dramatized their experiences, and the five
Uighurs

sent to Albania in 2006, after tribunals at Guantánamo cleared them
of being “enemy combatants.” In the latter case, this was apparently
because one of them, Abu Bakker Qassim, wrote an opinion piece for the

New York Times in which he urged U.S. lawmakers to defend habeas
corpus.
In the years since, many more ex-prisoners have written books, newspaper
articles, and op-eds, and have appeared on TV and in films. Perhaps

Omar Deghayes, the British resident (released in 2007), who appeared
in the Guantánamo documentary that I co-directed,

Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo, has now joined this
ever-expanding group of “recidivists” who have dared to use their words
and their voices to “attack” the United States for what it did to them in
its brutal, experimental prisons in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and
elsewhere.
Clearly, however, the main thrust of this propaganda is directed not at
these men, but at others 70, 80, 90 men, perhaps who have supposedly
engaged in terrorism since their release.
Is this plausible? In a word, no.
Even the most rampant apologists for the lawless regime created by George
W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld have never realistically tried
to claim that more than a dozen or so Saudis slipped through the Saudi
government’s rehabilitation program with their burning hatred of America
still intact. Moreover, once a handful of other regularly cited names
have been dealt with, and it becomes apparent that no “recidivists” have
emerged from a vast array of countries throughout Europe, North Africa
and the Gulf the only conclusion that a logical analyst can reach is
that this vast and largely undefined number of “recidivists” must include
as many as 1 in 3 of all the Afghans who were ever held.
This, to be honest, is no less preposterous, as only a handful of Taliban
commanders (released through

the Pentagon’s own ineptitude) were mistakenly freed from Guantánamo,
but it at least has the benefit of a certain amount of logic, in that men
repatriated to a country still occupied by a foreign army that is as
useless at rounding up “terrorists” as it was eight years ago, may find a
reason to resist the occupier on their doorstep, even if they have never
been near a “battlefield” before.
Even this, however, presupposes that the Pentagon’s “facts” and
“suspicions” are remotely accurate, and as researchers particularly
those at the Seton Hall Law School, who have relentlessly analyzed the
repeated claims of recidivism have demonstrated time and again
(
PDF), the propaganda does not stand up to any form of scrutiny. John
Brennan may be at liberty to talk about a few dozen released prisoners
who have “engaged in recidivism,” but entertaining the prospect that this
figure could be as high as 116 is, to put it frankly, either a
dereliction of duty, or a sign that he has fallen under the sway of Dick
Cheney’s still malevolent influence.
To understand how easy it is for credulous officials to fall for this
propaganda, I’d like to take you back to last month, when Senator Dianne
Feinstein, who, laughably, is the head of the Senate Intelligence
Committee,

falsely claimed on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that “about a third of
former inmates at the U.S. naval _base_ who have returned to fight against
U.S. interests come from Yemen,” as AFP described it. “If you look at
Yemen, and we're taking a good look at Yemen,” Feinstein said, “what you
see is, I think, at least 24 or 28 are confirmed returned to the
battlefield in Yemen, and a number are suspected. If you combine the
suspected and the confirmed, the number I have is 74 detainees have gone
back into the fight, and I think that's bad.”
It was a poor day for the Senate’s “intelligence” when Feinstein (drawing
on the May report) made this ridiculous statement. Its most baleful
effect was to add a deceptive veneer of acceptability to the pressure
exerted on President Obama to
suspend the release
of any more cleared Yemeni prisoners at Guantánamo, for one simple
reason: only 16 Yemeni prisoners were released from Guantánamo between
2004 and November 2009, and only one of these men allegedly became
involved in terrorism.
But in this new world of
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