Legal Commentary

Debunking the Pentagon's Gitmo Detainee Recidivism Claims

By Jeralyn

You've probably read the claims by the Defense Department that 61 of the released Guantanamo detainees have returned to terrorism.

Not so, says a new report from the Seton Hall Law School's Center for Policy and Research (and Law Prof Mark Denbeaux and attorney Joshua Denbeaux). The Denbaux' have previously authored compelling reports on the detainees and represented a few of them.

The Seton Hall Center for Policy and Research has issued a report which rebuts and debunks the most recent claim by the Department of Defense (DOD) that “61 in all former Guantanamo detainees are confirmed or suspected of returning to the fight.”

Professor Denbeaux of the Center for Policy & Research has said that the Center has determined that “DOD has issued “recidivism” numbers 43 times, and each time they have been wrong—this last time the most egregiously so.”

[More...]

Denbeaux explains:

“Once again, they’ve failed to identify names, numbers, dates, times, places, or acts upon which their report relies. Every time they have been required to identify the parties, they have been forced to retract their false ID’s and their numbers. They have included people who have never even set foot in Guantanamo —much less were they released from there. They have counted people as “returning to the fight” for having written an Op-ed piece in the New York Times and for having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival. They have revised and retracted their internally conflicting definitions, criteria, and their numbers so often that they have ceased to have any meaning— except as an effort to sway public opinion by painting a false portrait of the supposed dangers of these men.

Fourty-three times they have given numbers—which conflict with each other—all of which are seriously undercut by the DOD statement that “they do not track” former detainees. Rather than making up numbers “willy-nilly” about post release conduct, America might be better served if our government actually kept track of them.”

The full report is here.

The first report is here (pdf) and the second report is here (pdf.).

Full post as published by TalkLeft on January 16, 2009 (boomark / email).