Another election year, another scary 'report' on terrorism

Last week's report on ex-Guantanamo prisoners 're-engaging' with terrorism is laughable at best and dangerous at worst. But that won't stop it being exploited by those who want to keep the prison open.

As a member of Reprieve's Life After Guantanamo team, working to resettle prisoners around the world, last week's Report by the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Armed Services should have been a useful source of valuable information.  

The report claims to be an “in-depth, comprehensive bipartisan investigation of procedures to dispatch detainees from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility”. As such, we anticipated a detailed account of the various successes and challenges in resettling prisoners who have been detained for up to ten years without charge, often in countries to which they have never been, and where they know no-one and do not speak the language.

Instead, the report was flimsy, sensationalised, unverified and highly misleading. Rushed out in an election year, it appears designed to scare the Obama Administration and the public alike into keeping Guantanamo's prisoners locked up indefinitely and ensuring the continued mistreatment of those who have been released.

The Committee opens with a casual but highly damaging lie: using the term "reengagement" suggests that all the prisoners discussed had been ‘engaged’ in terrorism in the first place. This is categorically false.  And worse, it turns out the numbers of so-called 'reengagers' are speculative at best.  

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) estimated in September 2011 that 27% of the 600 former detainees who have left GTMO were "confirmed or suspected" to be presently or previously reengaged in terrorist activities. However, the report acknowledges that there is actually no way of knowing whom exactly is being accused of reengaging: “Until April 2009, DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] publicly identified some confirmed or suspected reengagers by name. The Agency no longer does so in an effort to protect intelligence sources and methods.”

How then can anyone test or verify the 27% figure? We are expected simply to take Agency's word for it. We do know, however, that the figure includes a substantial amount of "unverified" information -- little more than rumours. The scary 27% is a cynical conflation of “confirmed” and “suspected” reengagers, with 'suspected reengagement' based solely on "plausible but unverified" reports. 

The Committee then outlines three “snapshots of reengagement” from 2007 and 2008—all of which are well-known accusations, with no new evidence and certainly nothing to support the inflated 27% figure. The credibility of the report is further undermined by a case which it glosses over—that of Rasul Kudayev. The report asserts: “Rasul Kudayev… was arrested in early 2005 on suspicion of being connected to an attack on government buildings.” However in reality, public records show that Rasul was first detained by the Taliban and tortured on suspicion of being a Russian spy; he was then tortured at Kandahar and Guantanamo.  According to his mother he was virtually disabled at the time he is accused by the Russians of having carried out the raid on Nalchik. The accusations against him are not only unverified, but implausible too. So it is worrying that this is cited as one of the clearest examples of ‘re-engagement'.

Thankfully, a counter-report by the Dissenting Views of the Minority Members challenges the Committee’s ‘findings’, insisting that “we still do not know with any degree of credibility how many GTMO detainees have reengaged”. It also criticises the report's failure to look at any success stories. (Reprieve had offered to provide information on the many successful resettlements on which we have worked, but the Committee did not take us up on the offer.)

Yet perhaps most worrying of all, particularly for those who still believe in American values and ideals, is a passage complaining about the difficulties of making other countries detain prisoners without charge. The report relates: “A former Department of State official also told committee staff that it became apparent that few countries had viable mechanisms to detain individuals in the absence of criminal charges. ‘We would go to talk to these foreign governments, and they would say, ‘we can't,’ ‘it is just legally impossible for us’,’ to detain individuals for the duration of hostilities, Pierre Prosper [the Special Representative for War Crimes Issues] said.” (emphasis added)

The report also blames other countries' legal systems for failing to bring charges against ex-prisoners: “‘[m]any former detainees could…not be prosecuted in other countries because of the limitations of their laws.’” This complaint ignores the fact that the US could not bring such charges either -- which suggests that no charge should rightly be brought.

The Obama Administration still claims to be spreading freedom across the world, but the Committee's report betrays worrying attempts to do the opposite: to spread illegal 'War on Terror' detention practices far and wide. To get away with this, the US needs to keep us all in a perpetual state of fear. And in that one area, this disgraceful 'report' might just, unfortunately, succeed.