Who Are "The Worst Of The Worst"?

Sensationalist reports about former Guantánamo inmates 'returning to the battlefield' suggest a failure of intelligence

By Andy Worthington
Thursday 12 March 2009 15.30 GMT
Courtesy of The Guardian

According to officials in the US and the UK, Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, an Afghan prisoner freed from Guantánamo in December 2007, has surfaced as a Taliban leader responsible for roadside bomb attacks against British forces. While this may well be true – although there has, as yet, been no independent confirmation that the man calling himself Mullah Abdullah Zakir is indeed former prisoner 008 – claims that this poses "a potential complication for the Obama administration's efforts to close the prison" are largely overplayed.

This is not the first instance of a former prisoner "returning to the battlefield", of course, but an honest debate about the significance of these recidivist prisoners has been scuppered by sensationalism in the media, by a refusal on the part of the Pentagon to back up its regular claims about the numbers of prisoners who have "returned to the fight" and, perhaps most importantly, by the refusal of any of the parties concerned to examine the situation at Guantánamo, and to ask why the Pentagon seems to have such difficulties ascertaining who it has been holding in the prison.

In January, when the Pentagon issued a press release announcing that 61 former prisoners had returned to the battlefield, researchers at the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey, who have been monitoring the Pentagon's regular pronouncements about former prisoners, responded by pointing out that the "DoD has issued 'recidivism' numbers 43 times, and each time they have been wrong". Professor Mark Denbeaux of the Law School's Center for Policy & Research explained, "Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DoD has been forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers." He added, "They have counted people as 'returning to the fight' for their having written an Op-ed piece in the New York Times and for their having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival."

This is not to deny that genuinely dangerous men have been released, but when the latest unsubstantiated figures emerged from the Pentagon, even Robert Gates, the defence secretary, distanced himself from them, explaining that in fact the recidivism rate was "four or five percent" although he added, "there's been an uptick in recent months". Given that the recidivism rate for violent offenders in the US prison system is about 60%, and that countries throughout the world routinely release prisoners after they have served their sentences, even though many of them then go on to commit other violent crimes, the defence secretary was responsible for injecting some sanity into the debate, implicitly asking why it was regarded as plausible that Guantánamo should have a recidivism rate of zero.

However, the main problem with the sensationalism surrounding the news about Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul is that it masks some uncomfortable truths about Guantánamo itself. The first is that, although the US authorities touted the prison as a place that held "the worst of the worst", they never knew who they had in their possession, because they had secured most of the prisoners through substantial bounty payments in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and because they had refused to screen any of the prisoners on capture according to the competent tribunals established by the Geneva conventions. In the heat of the Bush administration's arrogance, the US vice-president Dick Cheney's legal counsel, David Addington, the driver of the administration's extra-legal manoueuvring, insisted that the president had designated all of the prisoners as "enemy combatants" on capture, without the use of any evidence whatsoever, and that no review of the basis of that decision was required.

It has taken lawyers and human rights activists many long years to be able to challenge these unjustifiable assertions in a courtroom, and in the meantime the decisions about who to release from Guantánamo have been based primarily not on notions of justice or considerations about the threat posed by the prisoners but on diplomatic arrangements with the prisoners' home countries. Demands for the men's repatriation have arisen precisely because the prisoners were held neither as criminal suspects nor as prisoners of war, but as "enemy combatants" without rights, and they could therefore have been avoided had the "war on terror" been pursued according to existing laws.