Campaign fact check: From Guantanamo to the battlefield

“By the way, thirty of the people that have already been released from Guantanamo Bay have already tried to attack America again. One of them just a couple of weeks ago as a suicide bomber in Iraq.”

—John McCain, Town Hall meeting, Pemberton, NJ, June 17, 2008.

John McCain made it very clear that he did not approve of the recent Supreme Court decision establishing habeas corpus for Guantanamo detainees. He called the ruling “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country,” echoing the position of Justice Antonin Scalia, who predicted that it would cause “more Americans to be killed.” According to the Republican nominee, 30 released detainees “have already tried to attack America again.” Is that true?

The Facts

There has been a lot of loose talk, from both liberals and conservatives, about what has happened to former Guantanamo detainees, so it is important to be as accurate as possible. Each side is twisting the facts to its own advantage, trying to put its own spin on fairly scanty evidence.

The latest Pentagon “fact sheet” on “former GTMO detainee terrorist trends,” dated June 13, states that 37 former Guantanamo detainees are “confirmed or suspected” of having returned to “terrorist activities” since their release. It puts the so-called recidivism rate at “between 5 and 7 percent.”

The Pentagon fact sheet names 13 former GITMO prisoners whose participation in various types of terrorist activity has been “confirmed,” in most cases because they have been killed or captured on something resembling a battlefield. There is no evidence that any of the 13 killed Americans. The names range from the leader of an al-Qaida cell in Turkey to Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi, a Kuwaiti citizen who killed 7 people in a suicide bomb attack on Mosul in April. The list includes three Chechens, transferred to Russia and subsequently re-arrested for terrorist activities.

In addition to the “confirmed” terrorists, the Pentagon also cites a figure of 24 former detainees “suspected” of terrorist activity on the basis of “unverified or single-source, but plausible, reporting.” None of the names on this list have been published. Without access to the names and other details, it is impossible to tell how many people on the “suspected” list have engaged in terrorist activity since their release from Guantanamo, or how many have tried to attack anything resembling an “American” target.

McCain is wrong to claim that 30 former Guantanamo detainees “have tried to attack America again.” While it is true that some of the former detainees named by the Pentagon were involved in attacks against coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is a stretch to claim that Chechen separatists accused of terrorism by the Russian government were trying “to attack America.” As for the former detainees merely “suspected” of terrorist activities, we have no information on what they were doing.

It is also wildly inaccurate to claim, as some have done, that at least 30 former Guantanamo detainees have been “killed or captured” on the battlefield, fighting against U.S. forces. Earlier this week, for example, Fox News commentator Dick Morris said that 50 former GITMO detainees had been “killed or captured by our forces” after being released. The Pentagon report lists one former detainee killed while fighting U.S. forces in Afghanistan and one killed by Afghan forces. Another former detainee blew himself up to avoid capture by Pakistani security forces.

It is worth noting that Defense Secretary Robert Gates was a lot less specific than either McCain or Morris when asked back in May how many former detainees had “returned to the battlefield.” His reply: “We don’t have a lot of specific cases. We’re talking about 1, 2, 3 dozen that we have data on, some information.”

The other side, meanwhile, has also been loose with the facts. A report co-authored by Mark Denbeaux, a Seton Hall University School of Law professor who represents two of the Guantanamo detainees, claimed that only one former detainee “took up arms against the United States.” The Pentagon report lists half a dozen former detainees fighting U.S. or coalition forces in Iraq or Afghanistan.

According to Denbeaux, the Pentagon has included former detainees who spoke out against their treatment at Guantanamo on the suspected terrorist list. A Pentagon spokesman, Commander Jeffrey Gordon, dismissed the Denbeaux report as “misleading,” and said that anti-U.S. propaganda activities were not sufficient to warrant inclusion on the list.

This is a complicated and emotional issue, which makes it all the more necessary to be very precise in the definition of terms. It would have been accurate for McCain to have said that the Pentagon has confirmed that 13 former detainees have engaged in some kind of terrorist activity since their release, and suspects another 24 men of being involved in such activity. Instead he said flatly that 30 people who have been released from Guantanamo have “tried to attack America again.” There is a significant difference between those two statements.