This latest report by the New America Foundation was made available to reporters prior to its publication in Foreign Policy at a panel discussion, "Nine Years of Guantà ¡namo: What Now?" that I had organized at the New America Foundation on the afternoon of January 11, and it prompted questions from the audience, and responses that were noted by Dan Froomkin of the Huffington Post. Froomkin explained that I was "concerned at how the recidivism figures were 'conjured up out of nowhere' but treated as fact by many mainstream media outlets," and that I described it as "bad journalism," and that is certainly the position I have always maintained.
He also picked up on comments made by Tom Wilner, the former attorney for the Kuwaiti prisoners at Guantà ¡namo, who represented the Guantà ¡namo prisoners during their habeas corpus claims in the Supreme Court in 2004 and 2008. Wilner directly addressed another problem with the recidivism claims -- the US authorities' failure to consider whether some of the relased men confirmed to have engaged in terrorist activity had not "returned" to a battlefield, but had actually been radicalized by their experience in US custody, and his conclusions were stark.
Speaking of Abdullah al-Ajmi, a former client of his who died as a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2008, two-and-a-half years after his release, Wilner explained, "I was absolutely convinced that he did not do anything wrong, but I was concerned about his release, because he had become furious. He had turned, at Guantà ¡namo, into this sort of madman."
This chimes with comments made in June last year by Abdulrahman al-Hadlaq, the director of the Saudi rehabilitation center responsible for re-educating prisoners released from Guantà ¡namo, along with suspected or confirmed militants seized within the country and in other locations. Al-Hadlaq actually claimed that "about 20 per cent of the 120 repatriated former prisoners [from Guantà ¡namo] have returned to radical activity" (whereas the New America Foundation mentioned only 15 confirmed or suspected Saudis in its report), but, crucially, in explaining why this rate was double that of the other men who passed through the program, he told reporters, "Those guys from other groups didn't suffer torture," unlike the men held at Guantà ¡namo, adding, "Torturing is the most dangerous thing in radicalisation. You have more extremist people if you have more torture."
As the gulf between the 1 in 4 recidivists claimed by the government clashes with the figure of 1 in 17 reported by the New America Foundation, it may be, as the authors of last week's report conceded, that "there might be some additional former detainees who are suspected or confirmed of engaging in terrorism or insurgent activities who we could not identify in the publicly available sources."
Those, however, cannot reasonably be expected to turn a figure of 48 "recidivists" into 150, and in addition, as I highlighted above, all of these assessments fail to consider whether the men in question are indeed recidivists, or whether it was their treatment at the hands of their US captors that prompted what Tom Wilner described, in Abdullah al-Ajmi's case, as fury and madness.
While supporters of Guantà ¡namo still follow Dick Cheney's line, critics of the prison's ongoing existence will be paying close attention to the circumstances of the men's radicalization, and will not be at all surprised to discover that the United States cannot, in all honesty, claim that, in some instances, what happened to the men after their release from Guantà ¡namo was not determined by what happened to them while they were held -- and brutalized -- in US custody.
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