recidivism

I was out on Friday and offline this weekend, but don’t miss Adam Serwer at Tapped birddogging a CBS report on a Pentagon survey ostensibly showing an 18 percent “recidivism” rate for released Guantanamo detainees. According to Serwer, CBS didn’t report that the survey isn’t actually finished, which seems like quite the relevant detail.
But one [...]

Via Adam Serwer at Tapped, the New America Foundation has a new report out addressing that slippery, demagoguery-filled claim about Guantanamo detainees “returning” to the battlefield after the Bush administration released them.
Contrary to recent assertions that one in seven, or 14 percent, of the former prisoners had “returned to the battlefield,” our analysis of Pentagon [...]

There’s no shortage of demagoguery about the Guantanamo Bay detainee cohort, regardless of how many times reason tries to prevail. Among the worst is the dubious and often-recycled claims about inflated numbers of released Guantanamo detainees who’ve “returned” to the battlefield. It’s unwise to take this stuff at face value, and McClatchy’s Nancy Youssef elegantly [...]

Good for The New York Times and reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, who’ve modified their initial phrasing in today’s piece about Guantanamo so as not to presume that ex-Guantanamo detainees were terrorists in the first place. Justin Elliott reports.

So claims Human Rights Watch in a press release.
The former detainee, Rasul Kudaev, has been held for more than three years in pretrial detention in Nalchik, a city in southern Russia, where he is accused of participating in an October 2005 armed uprising against the local government. Human Rights Watch’s investigations into Kudaev’s case found [...]

Why is former Vice President Dick Cheney — who’s planning to speak at the American Enterprise Institute right after President Obama’s national security speech today — going around arguing that President Obama is making the United States less safe, when it’s the Bush administration that released the 534 Guantanamo Bay prisoners, 74 of whom the [...]

To follow up on Spencer’s post about today’s New York Times story citing a secret Pentagon report that finds that “1 in 7 Rejoin Jihadists After Release,” it’s worth noting that not only has the Pentagon not provided any way of knowing who 45 of the 74 alleged recidivists are, but apparently only five of [...]

As The New York Times reports, the Pentagon is sitting on a document that claims one in seven Guantanamo Bay detainees released by the Bush administration returns* to terrorism. These claims have come up before and been debunked before. But it shouldn’t matter. If there’s a relevant piece of information for the Guantanamo debate, it [...]