WASHINGTON — An unreleased Pentagon report provides new details concluding that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has returned to terrorism or militant activity, according to administration officials.| This isn't as helpful in the debate as it seems. The Bambi administration leaks this now on top of the Senate vote, lets it go away into the collective memory hole, and tries again later this year to get the money to close Gitmo. |
| The Pentagon believes that 74 prisoners released from Guantánamo have returned to terrorism, making for a recidivism rate of nearly 14 percent. |
The White House has said that Mr. Obama will provide further details about his plans for closing the prison there in a speech Thursday morning at the National Archives.
Pentagon officials said there had been no pressure from the White House to suppress the report, and said they believed that the Defense Department employees, some of them holdovers from the Bush administration, were acting pre-emptively to protect their jobs.
| Ah yes, the evil Bushies are at it again. Perhaps they're Cheney plants? |
Previous assertions by the Pentagon that substantial numbers of former Guantánamo prisoners had returned to terrorism were harshly criticized by civil liberties and human rights groups who said the information was too vague to be credible and amounted to propaganda in favor of keeping the prison open. The Pentagon began making these assertions in 2007 but stopped earlier this year, shortly before Mr. Obama took office. In recent days, the Pentagon has run into rising objections in Congress to closing the prison, particularly from Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, who said recently that Guantánamo detainees would “never” be released in the United States.
On Wednesday, Michele A. Flournoy, the under secretary of defense for policy, reminded reporters that many of these now expressing reservations about the transfer of prisoners from Guantánamo had also called for the closing it. “I think there will be some that need to end up in the United States,” she said.
Among the 74 former prisoners that the report says are again engaged in terrorism, 29 have been identified by name by the Pentagon, including 16 named for the first time in the report. The Pentagon has said that the remaining 45 could not be named because of national security and intelligence-gathering concerns.
In the report, the Pentagon confirmed that two former Guantánamo prisoners whose terrorist activities had been previously reported had indeed returned to the fight. They are Said Ali al-Shihri, a leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch suspected in a deadly bombing of the United States embassy in Sana, Yemen’s capital, last year, and Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, an Afghan Taliban commander, who also goes by the name Mullah Abdullah Zakir.
The Pentagon has so far provided no way of authenticating its 45 unnamed recidivists, and only a few of the 29 people who are identified by name can be independently verified as having engaged in terrorism since their release. Many of the 29 are simply described as associating with terrorists or training with terrorists, with almost no other details provided.
“It’s part of a campaign to win the hearts and minds of history for Guantánamo,” said Mark P. Denbeaux, a professor at Seton Hall University School of Law who has represented Guantánamo detainees and co-written three studies highly critical of the Pentagon’s previous recidivism reports. “They want to be able to claim there really were bad people there.”
| Take them home with you, Mr. Denbeaux, and let's see what happens. |