Asked by Jeff Schogol of Stars & Stripes about the recidivism rate, Harward said  ”very, very few” detainees leave U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan to return to the battlefield. He elaborated that about 3000 Afghans in eight years had been detained by U.S. forces, with 750 detained in the past year and 550 detained at the new facility at Bagram called Parwan. Out of those, Harward said he could document a total of  17 ex-detainees who had returned to the fight. “That’s less than half of one percent,” he said.

But it’s not the whole story. Harward said he couldn’t account for those detained insurgents turned over to the Afghan authorities and what their recidivism rate is. “I can tell you it’s very, very low for those that are captured by U.S. forces and go through our detention facilities,” he said.

But one more thing. Isn’t the more surprising fact that 100 percent of the released detainees don’t perform acts of terrorism? Take away someone’s freedom, for years, without charge; hold him in a kind of legal limbo; subject him to abuse — these are things that you’d expect would either strengthen someone’s resolve to be a terrorist or convert an innocent man into an implacable enemy. Ask Ayman Zawahiri.

Contrary to recent assertions that one in seven, or 14 percent, of the former prisoners had “returned to the battlefield,” our analysis of Pentagon reports, news stories, and other public records indicates that the number who were confirmed or suspected to be involved in anti-U.S. violence is closer to one in 25, or 4 percent.

Worth remembering: this matches the figure that Defense Secretary Robert Gates gave in congressional testimony in January.

Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil spends his days going from one high-level official meeting to another with the swagger of a tribal elder, advocating for the needs of Kunar province, his home region.

Each encounter — with President Hamid Karzai, with Karzai’s chief of staff or with one of Afghanistan’s other presidential candidates — begins the same: They thank him for his honorable service to the people of Kunar.

Despite those endorsements, the Pentagon says that Wakil is among 74 former Guantanamo Bay detainees who’ve returned to or are suspected of returning to terrorism after their release from the island prison camp.

Now you can look at this one of two ways. One way is to take the pre-Copernican mindset and reason that Hamid Karzai and the rest of the Afghan political establishment has ties to terrorism. Another is to say that the Pentagon may not really have the best intelligence about who’s actually a “recidivist.” Your call.

–

You can follow TWI on Twitter and Facebook.

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 that he was severely beaten soon after his arrest to confess to crimes.

“If the Pentagon relied on forced confessions for the evidence to prove recidivism, then its conclusions are pretty questionable,” said Carroll Bogert, associate director of Human Rights Watch. “Terrorism is a label that is widely abused by many of the governments who have taken back their citizens from Guantanamo.”

For more on the circumstances behind Kudaev’s treatment in Russia, see this. Something to consider when the Pentagon’s Guantanamo Bay “recidivism” document gets released, as it ought to be.

As Spencer pointed out earlier, none of those people were ever actually determined to be terrorists, so “recidivism” would be the wrong word, and as I noted,  only five of those 74 appear to be “verifiable.” So we’re left with a policy of indefinite detention, abuse and torture that just about everyone now agrees was a failure — including, apparently the Pentagon — and Cheney is devoting himself to defending it. Couldn’t the Republican party find a more credible spokesperson for their position — maybe even someone who’s actually a current elected official?

So now we’ve gone from 74 prisoners released from Guantanamo that “have returned to terrorism or military activity,” according to the Pentagon, but only 5 of those are verifiable?  On what evidence is the Pentagon basing the other 69? Is it the same sort of evidence that the government used to hold people in Guantanamo that judges have lately been saying is wholly insufficient, such as that the person was arrested while staying at a guest house where some al-Qaeda operatives also stayed? (That was the bulk of the flimsy evidence used to imprison Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, which a federal court judge recently said was not sufficient. Apparently lots of innocent university students stayed there, too.)

It’s worth noting that the 534 prisoners were released by President Bush, not President Obama, and most releases did not follow any sort of systematic review of the danger they pose, but were usually based on whether the U.S. government could negotiate a deal with their native country to take them back. So if any of them were plotting anything against the United States, it’s not all that surprising that the Bush administration’s system of returning them didn’t weed those individuals out.

By contrast, the Obama administration has released only two Guantanamo prisoners so far. It’s worth wondering if this newly leaked report and all its inconclusive speculation is being leaked now to allow President Obama to either keep the Guantanamo prison open beyond the deadline he set in his first days in office, and/or to justify his plans for continued indefinite detention of those prisoners the Pentagon believes are dangerous, but against whom it doesn’t have any solid, “verifiable” evidence.

Anyhow, The Times saw the document — it reports that it will probably be released soon anyhow, according to Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman — and it claims a recidivism rate* of 14 percent of detainees. That’s at odds with Defense Secretary Bob Gates’ claim of a “four or five percent” recidivism rate in January, but maybe this represents new data. (Has there been enough data since January to make such an uptick plausible? Hmm.)

This, however, doesn’t inspire confidence:

The Pentagon has provided no way of authenticating its 45 unnamed recidivists, and only a few of the 29 people 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.

I would say “training with terrorists” is worrisome enough, and “associating” can mean a variety of things, but would justify, say, surveillance. Still, how political is this report?

Pentagon officials said there had been no pressure from the Obama White House to suppress the report about the Guantánamo detainees who had been transferred abroad under the Bush administration. The officials said they believed that Defense Department employees, some of them holdovers from the Bush administration, were acting to protect their jobs.

Just because someone is a Bush holdover doesn’t make them a bad person. Ask Bob Gates. But all of this is grounds for suspicion. The Times quotes one of the Seton Hall researchers who debunked the “61 detainees” report as saying, “It’s part of a campaign to win the hearts and minds of history for Guantánamo.” Perhaps. But the document should be released and then we can judge for ourselves.

* “Return” and “Recidivism” are terms that imply we know that these detainees were terrorists to begin with. That’s presuming facts not in evidence. What we know is that they’ve been held at Guantanamo for years and presumed to be terrorists based on a battlefield evidentiary standard. In terms of framing, this is a poor and misleading shorthand. It’s easy to imagine, for instance, that someone who’s been detained under harsh conditions for years would be so infuriated that he would then become a terrorist.