Ben Wittes agrees with me that preventing transfers from Guantanamo is a bad idea, but takes issue with my argument that most of the detainees at Gitmo were "innocent":
This is becoming a pretty common argument on the Left, related conceptually to the even-more common argument that releases are themselves evidence of “innocence.” (You know the trope: We held these detainees for years, never filed charges, and finally released them–proving they were wrongly detained the whole time.) Both arguments are analytically wrong. Many people reasonably detained at Guantanamo were foreign fighters who went to support, aid, and fight with the Taliban. They are not common criminals, and they may not even be terrorists either–at least not in the sense of people who are likely to detonate a car bomb in a village market. They are guys who got entranced with jihad and joined up with a particularly nasty militia that ended up fighting the U.S. and its allies. It should be no particular surprise that, when released, they go home and demobilize at much higher rates than the rate at which common criminals turn from the life. That does not mean their detentions were unjustified. And it doesn't make them “innocent”; indeed, innocence and guilt are not really the relevant concepts here at all. It means simply that the military took a calculated risk that the threat they posed could be handled by means other than detention, and the risk in many cases has paid off.
I think Wittes is more right when he argues that guilt and innocence aren't useful concepts here. The nature of how the U.S. government fights terrorism is sufficiently muddled in terms of whether or not the laws of war or criminal conduct apply that one could argue detaining a Taliban fighteris justified under the laws of war even if they aren't culpable for a "crime" in the sense we generally think of criminals being culpable. But I also think Wittes goes too far by characterizing them all as "guys who got entranced with jihad and joined up with a particularly nasty militia that ended up fighting the U.S. and its allies." For some, that might be true, for others the decision was a matter of rational economic interest, for individuals such as Omar Khadr and Mohammed Jawad, there is substantial evidence their participation was coerced. A small number are hardcore ideologues. Still others like the Uighurs were genuine mistakes, people who had no meaningful connection to the Taliban whatsoever, and were victims of substandard status review procedures that the Obama administration has since improved.
So maybe it's a bit of an overreach to say "innocent," although I think when people on the left say "innocent" what we're really saying is that the Bush administration's claim that the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay held the "worst of the worst" cannot be supported, given the number of people they set free. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell's Former Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson has said openly that "the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released."
That's what the Left means by "innocent." Although Wittes makes a compelling point that perhaps a better word is in order, although I don't know what that would be. I use it because I can't think of anything more accurate, although I'll concede it's imperfect. The word "recidivism" in this context though, is clearly nonsense, since the government doesn't distinguish between former detainees who were actually involved in terrorism or war prior to capture and have "returned" and those who were radicalized by their imprisonment.
