Catch and Release: The Guantanamo Recidivism Problem.

Weekly Standard ^ | December 28, 2009 (print) | Stephen F. Hayes

[reaganaut1]

Last spring, in an interview with 60 Minutes, Barack Obama criticized his predecessor over the detainees at Guantánamo Bay. That wasn't new. What was surprising was one of the arguments the president made. When Steve Kroft pointed out that some of those released had been working to recruit others to jihad, Obama agreed.

Well, there's no doubt that we have not done a particularly effective job in sorting through who are truly dangerous individuals that we've got to make sure are not a threat to us, who are folks that we just swept up.

A classified Defense Intelligence Agency report leaked to the New York Times in May supported that claim. Return to the Battlefield showed that 74 detainees transferred or released from Guantánamo had returned to jihad. That's one in seven--a recidivism rate of 14 percent.

So the problem, according to Obama, was that the Bush administration was too lenient. The obvious solution: Apply greater scrutiny to detainees under consideration for release and slow the pace of transfers. But the Obama administration went the opposite direction. Having promised to shutter the detention facility at Guantánamo within one year, the administration has lowered the threshold for detainees eligible to be shipped out and is expediting the procedures for transferring or releasing them.

A total of 31 Guantánamo detainees have been transferred or released since Obama took office.

Among them are several men who acknowledged -receiving training in al Qaeda's notorious "al Farouq" camp. One, Binyam Mohamed, was slated to participate in the next wave of al Qaeda attacks on American soil in 2002. Another, Ahmed Zuhair, was convicted in absentia of participating in terrorist attacks in Bosnia in the late 1990s and almost certainly participated in the assassination of William Jefferson, an American working for the United Nations.

[reaganaut1]

Keep them in Gitmo. The world leaders who hypocritically denounce the U.S. for Gitmo don't want the detainees in their countries either.

[Bernard]

In all the speechifying Obama made, did he ever say what would happen to the inmates, or was the promise to close Gitmo the entire statement? In other words, did he ever say that he would release all the detainees, or just move them?