I have yet to get my hands on a copy of the Defense Intelligence Agency's latest Guantanamo Bay recidivism report, which CBS news reported last week shows a recidivism rate of 18 percent, up 4 percent from April when the rate was 14 percent. This is still extremely low compared to say, the recidivism rate of U.S. prisons, which hovers around 66 percent, but obviously alarming for an administration attempting to figure out what to do with detainees it has in custody.
Here's the problem: Last time around, the numbers of detainees who had "returned to the fight" were inflated by the Pentagon including those detainees who had talked to reporters, written op-eds, or otherwise spoken out against their treatment. Both Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the New America Foundation pegged the recidivism rate at Gitmo as being 4 percent, far lower than the Pentagon's own study.
Then there's the problem with the CBS report itself. The reason I haven't been able to get a copy of the new recidivism report is that it hasn't been released, and a Pentagon official I spoke to revealed that the report still hasn't been "finalized," which is a pretty key bit of information that for some reason, CBS decided to leave out. Maybe the number will end up being the same, maybe it won't. But if the report isn't finished, then people should know that.
-- A. Serwer
