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Obama preparing order to close Gitmo


Flashermac

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Itâ??s a real stretch to believe that a bunch of innocents would be randomly rounded up and put in â??goat pensâ? at tremendous cost in terms of dollars and (horrors) loss of standing by a gaggle of foreign sympathizers and domestic protectors of â??American valuesâ?Â.

HH

 

It is not such a stretch when you consider we were paying for info leading to the arrest of these people. I mentioned this upthread. $5K US equals THB 150K+ so in a third world country it is not a stretch (and we now know) that people turned in their rivals/enemies anyone they did not like.

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If the White House and Pentagon are going to make wise decisions about what to do with the Guantanamo Bay detainees they are going to need accurate information upon which to base their new policies.

 

Yet the single most cited â??factâ? last week about the terror suspects - that 61 of the men released from Gitmo have returned to fight against us - is simply not true. The number is far lower than that. And the longer â??61â? is used as a â??talking pointâ? by critics of the administration of President No. 44 the longer it will be before a viable solution is found.

 

The figure comes from a Pentagon press conference on January 13th - just a week before the end of the Bush Administration - in which a Defense Department spokesman declared: â??The new numbers [for recidivists] are, we believe, 18 confirmed and 43 suspected of returning to the fight. So 61 in all former Guantanamo detainees are confirmed or suspected of returning to the fight.â? Many news organizations did the math - 18 plus 43 equals 61 -but negligently failed to include the important qualifier â??suspectedâ? for the â??43â? figure. Moreover, there is reason to doubt the accuracy of even the â??18â? figure the Pentagon seems more sure about. ...

 

Moreover, the governmentâ??s criteria which defines whether these men even ought to be classified in this fashion is opaque and somewhat nebulous. For example, the report indicates that â??engaging in anti-U.S. propagandaâ? constitutes a â??return to the fightâ? and then cites several examples of detainees who were not initially listed as â??recidivistâ? but then made the list. Apparently, the â??Tipton Threeâ? - three English-speaking detainees - made the list only after they participated in the widely-viewed (and occasionally hailed) film, â??The Road to Guantanamo.â?Â

 

So the â??61â? figure is a basically a sham and everyone who cares knows it. Perhaps this is why Newsweekâ??s Michael Isikoff reported over the weekend that the Pentagon is going to release as early as this week declassified portions of a â??secret reportâ? that purports to provide new details on the so-called â??recidivists.â? And perhaps the obvious holes in the â??61â? story also explain why wobbly Pentagon officials confirmed this past week that Said Ali Al-Shihri, a Yemeni national returned from Gitmo, has apparently become some sort of al Qaeda â??deputy commanderâ? (whatever that means). ...

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I saw an interview of someone who was tracking it and he said the former administration offered no detailed information on what defines 'fought against us'. Also, he said the numbers changed significantly. The interviewer hinted that the numbers seem to be made up.

 

Nothing substantive was offered by the former administration to support the numbers.

 

As I said, its a worry of mine that some hard core terrorists are out there but two things keep gnawing at me. First, the law or rather the attempt to circumvent due process with some little known and prior little used term instead of POW. Second, is that these guys are too well known now to everyone. I would also assume terrorist groups would not want to associate with them because they know these guys will be tracked. There is a great risk that anyone they meet with will also come under the radar.

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