During the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today, the conversation turned to the closing of Gitmo. Philip Zelikow, the director of the 9/11 Commission and former Bush administration lawyer, said there is a “broad spectrum” of detainees held at Gitmo, “many of whom do not show large signs of future dangerousness.” How, exactly, does Zelikow know this? Has he conducted an analysis of the detainee population? Is he relying on some other review performed by the government (remember: The Obama administration hasn’t even completed its inter-agency review of the detainees yet)? Or, is Zelikow just making this up because it is what he wants to believe? The truth is that Zelikow and the U.S. government cannot even tell precisely how many of the former detainees, who have already been released or transferred, “show large signs of future dangerousness.” In fact, Zelikow himself correctly noted there are no “reliable statistics” on the recidivism rate of former detainees. That’s because we simply do not know what many of the former detainees are doing — foreign governments offer an imperfect accounting of their status. We know that dozens of former detainees have returned to the fight. My own analysis generated 32 detainees who are or were likely involved in terrorist activities after being released, based on open sources alone. The Department of Defense has said there are more than 60 suspected or confirmed of returning to the fight. This is likely a low estimate, as these are only the known or strongly suspected examples. How does Zelikow know that “many” of the current 240 or so detainees are not like those who have returned to the fight? Indeed, the U.S. government has made strong allegations against “many” of the current detainees — this is clear based on thousands of pages of unclassified documents. Undoubtedly, some of these allegations are wrong or based on thin evidence. But are many of them wrong? It is highly doubtful. In fact, U.S. military intelligence clearly thinks that “many” of the current detainees do show significant signs of “future dangerousness” — otherwise they would have been already released. But Zelikow knows better and thinks that in “many” cases there is little to worry about.
