Former Gitmo Tribunal Judge on Tribunals and Gitmo in General

[Tuckerfan]

Transcript of a talk given at a Carnegie Council function. I find one part of it particularly interesting:

Bear in mind that there are some 380 people down there, of whom I think for about 50 to 100 there is evidence that may justify prosecutions. That does not mean that the other 300 are good guys and they never did anything wrong. It means for those 100, there is evidence of war crimes. There are still other people that were picked up on a battlefield trying to kill our people, and some of them are pretty nasty people.

I have to say also that we know of 12 who have been released over time. There were as many as 700 there. There are 12 who were back on the battlefield or planning or operating against our forces in Afghanistan and in other places. For some of them we know that because we killed them the second time and they are dead. We were able to identify them as people who had been at Guantánamo and sweet-talked their way through the process and went back. At least a couple of others were actually in the hierarchy of al Qaeda and part of the brain trust.

So, out of roughly 400 people who have been released from Gitmo, only 12 of them have taken up arms against the US after they were released. Kind of undermines the justification for keeping them locked up for an “indefinite” period of time, doesn’t it?

[Diceman]

Presumably, the guys that were released are the ones that we didn’t have any real evidence against. From what I’ve heard, a lot of Iraqis settled personal grudges by accusing the other guy of being an insurgent. No surprise that most of those guys haven’t caused trouble.

The 380 that are still being held are presumably the ones that they’re pretty sure are bad dudes. 50-100 are suspected of war crimes, after all. Probably, most of the rest were involved in a gunfight with troops, or were caught in an Al Qaeda stronghold, or something like that.