White House Repeats Pentagon Lies About Guantánamo “Recidivists”

8.2.10

The White HouseWhat 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 objectivity, 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).

Brennan wrote that:

[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’ cases, he wrote:

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 appeared in a film, “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 US lawmakers to defend habeas corpus.

Outside the Law: Stories from GuantanamoIn 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 US naval base who have returned to fight against US 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 groundless hysteria, which seems to reveal only how the baleful reach of the Pentagon’s scaremongering has finally engulfed the White House, no one cares that Feinstein couldn’t even get her facts straight.

With John Brennan embracing the lie that 116 of the 532 men released from Guantánamo between 2002 and January 2009 have “engaged in recidivist activities” — and with a compliant and complacent mainstream media happy to regurgitate such rubbish without asking for facts — it may as well be true, as Feinstein claimed, that 28 of the 16 Yemenis returned from Guantánamo have become terrorists.

Once upon a time, we used to pride ourselves on making policy decisions based on facts, rather than on the propaganda that was so prevalent in totalitarian regimes. Now, however, we might as well give up all pretense that this is the case. Just as people were tortured in Guantánamo to produce false confessions that could be used in show trials, like every other totalitarian regime, representatives of the US government now attempt to scare and intimidate the American public with “facts” about “recidivism” that have no basis in reality. In 2010, fear blinds reason, and the truth, it seems, is irrelevant.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation. Cross-posted on The Public Record and Uruknet.

6 Responses

  1. Will Shirley says...

    In our Patriot Acts we have agreed to become a totalitarian state, giving our selected President absolute power over life and death towards all people of the world, not just Americans and their prisoners. We don’t talk about it much now but I think somebody should consider the concept that if these laws remain in place, replacing the Constitution and Bill of Rights, we are bound to get not a benevolent dictator like Obama, but a Stalin-like figure, maybe Palin, maybe even Cheney. Both are deranged and have expressed a fondness for violence. Palin likes to shoot wolves from a helicopter, Cheney likes to shoot old men in the face. It’s funny how history works to explain the past while actually living that time was foggy and unclear. Once the realities are scraped from the lies we see that since the reign of Nixon our nation has been sold off bit by bit. Our rights and freedoms are gone and very few seem to think about the implications, saying tough times call for tough actions. I keep thinking of the myth about the frogs and their King Log. We think we’re doing fine, maybe bankrupted but otherwise as long as our avowed enemies, the communist Chinese, continue to finance our addiction to violence we can get along. Then one day we wake up and most of the banks have no money, no jobs are being created, wars have left us with tens of thousands of brain injured individuals who aren’t getting good health care and the nation is awash with guns. I just don’t see how this can clean up in my lifetime, especially since we seem to be content to allow these thugs to run our country into the ground while stripping us of any real wealth we may have been able to cling to. Democrats, Republicans, Independents… none have a grasp of sociology or history. A collapsing Empire can go slowly, like England, or quickly like the Soviets. The faster it dissolves the more violent the changeover. Like a dying man mumbling “I’m okay, I just can’t feel my legs…my arms…my chest…” Americans are turning their faces from any form of truth. They can’t take it and that need to ignore the obvious is so great that they will believe that 75 out of 25 prisoners are evil geniuses, or dollars are wealth, or numbers on a paper are valuable commodities.

    The fate of this country is sealed, although it may take awhile for the world to say it aloud. We need to stop looking for a cure for our illness and start looking for a nice cemetery plot. The only people with the legal right to fix the situation are the very ones who put us on the road to ruin. I see no reason to expect them to suddenly become sane and get to the work at hand. The one or two in Congress who are still sane are helpless to do anything, obviously. I think the best use of our time is to design a government for the 21st century, a sustainable economy, a rational foreign policy, an educational system that will educate the people and a clear understanding that people have a right to a home and decent health care. We do NOT have a right to point missiles at people we’ve never even met.

  2. Andy Worthington says...

    Thanks, Will. An excellent analysis, as usual. You have the pulse of your country, although no one wants to listen to the doctor. Much better to have idiots who shoot wolves from planes or who shoot their friends in the face, to advocate waterboarding a man who is prepared to tell everything he knows without anyone laying a finger on him, and to maintain, with straight-faced cowardice, that five other tortured men are, for the first time in history, too dangerous to prosecute in the place where they committed their crimes, than to have to tackle the truth about the nation’s bankruptcy, its addiction to violence, and the dismal NIMBYist cowardice of grown men elected to office, who, despite regarding themselves as tough guys, are a laughing stock around the world.

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    […] for his actions. If he talks about his captivity, the US military will call it recidivism as they have in the past when Guantanamo victims were released and spoke about their […]

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Andy Worthington

Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker. Also, photo-journalist (The State of London), and singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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