After four months of denials, dissembling and delays, the Obama administration has finally released a Pentagon report on recidivism among former Guantanamo Bay detainees. Yes, it’s true that the report was only released after the New York Times reported extensively on its contents last week. And yes, it’s true that the report was released just two hours after President Obama named his first Supreme Court nominee — turning the heads of the Washington press corps from a national security debate he was losing to the inspiring story of Sonia Sotomayor. And it is also true that Obama’s strong “presumption in favor of disclosure” did not apply to this politically sensitive study for the first four months of his presidency — and for more than three months since THE WEEKLY STANDARD was told it would be released. And finally, it is true that Obama has tried to position the report in a way that would be politically advantageous — using his speech last week to complain that most of the recidivists were let go by his predecessor. He’s right, of course. And it’s an interesting approach. Who would have thought that four months into his term we’d be listening to Barack Obama criticize George W. Bush for being too lenient on detained terrorists. It’s an argument that doesn’t fit well with much of Obama’s never-ending critique of Bush national security policy. And it risks boxing him further on Guantanamo. The report shows that some 14 percent of detainees released from Guantanamo Bay are now engaged in jihad. And despite the efforts of some in the media to claim that the numbers are inflated — guided helpfully as they have been by liberal interest groups and left-wing lawyers — it’s almost certainly the case that 14 percent is an understatement. The effort of the U.S. government and our supposed allies to track these terrorists is, shall we say, uneven. The detainees the Bush administration released or repatriated were judged to have been those least likely to return to jihad. Most of those who remain at Gitmo — some 240 terrorists — are there because they were deemed especially dangerous — “the worst of the worst” in the words of one counterterrorism expert. Does Obama think the detainees he releases or repatriates — and there are likely to be a good percentage of them — will be less likely to return to jihad? At one point, it was the position of his State Department that “a majority” of the nearly 100 Yemenis in Guantanamo should be repatriated so that they might “make a future for themselves” back in Yemen — a country that has long been hospitable to al Qaeda and like-minded jihadists. Still, we finally have the report. Good for the president. Now he can affirm his commitment to transparency by releasing two additional batches of information that his administration has fought to keep from public view: 1) CIA reports requested by former Vice President Dick Cheney that detail the results of the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, and, 2) documents surrounding the briefings the CIA provided to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on those techniques. Obama allies have claimed that the documents Cheney has requested do not show what he claims they show. Okay, release them. The White House — the self-declared most transparent White House in history — is hiding behind a silly technicality to keep the documents under seal. The CIA claims that the Cheney documents cannot be released because they are the subject of FOIA litigation and despite the president’s authority to declassify and release them, he is deferring to the CIA. So he is using FOIA as a shield. Weak. Congressional Republicans have also requested that the CIA declassify and release documents that will either support or contradict Pelosi’s claim that she was misled by the CIA. The White House has thus far refused to defend the Agency from Pelosi’s claim and the CIA has rejected an initial request to make supporting documents public. But they are relevant. If Pelosi’s charges are true, those who lied to Congress could be prosecuted for their offense. If they are not, Pelosi is unfit to lead her party. The CIA has more paperwork on the briefings. Did CIA briefers show lawmakers a slide show or PowerPoint presentation with details of the techniques used on detainees? Is there documentation of the contents of the briefings — memos to the file, email traffic between the briefers and senior intelligence officials, a postmortem on the briefings prepared for CIA Director George Tenet? Given that President Obama has already released the OLC memos detailing the techniques, what is the justification for continuing to block the release of documents detailing the briefings about those techniques? “I will never hide the truth because it is uncomfortable,” Obama said on Thursday.
