The real Gitmo inmates

NY Times:

... a new study requested by the Pentagon argues that large numbers of detainees were a direct threat to United States forces, including al Qaeda fighters, terrorism-training camp veterans and men who had experience with explosives, sniper rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.

The report, by a terrorism study center at West Point, is essentially a rebuttal by the military of growing assertions by advocates for detainees that the naval station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is filled with hapless innocents and low-level cooks and other support personnel who pose no real threat.

It paints a chilling portrait of the Guantánamo detainees. Publicly available information, the report says, indicates that 73 percent of them were a “demonstrated threat” to American or coalition forces. It says that 95 percent were at the least a “potential threat,” including detainees who had played a supporting role in terrorist groups or had expressed a commitment to pursuing jihadist violence.

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With about 360 detainees still held at Guantánamo, the struggle to shape public views of the detainees has become a central focus for the Bush administration and for detainees’ advocates. In the courts and in Congress as well as within the administration, some officials have argued that the detainees are far more dangerous than they are portrayed in the press, or in arguments by their advocates.

The report is an analysis of previously released military summaries of the unclassified evidence used in 516 of the military hearings that determine whether detainees are properly held as enemy combatants. It was written at the request of the Pentagon by the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy at West Point, a teaching and research center that describes itself as “actively involved in supporting the global war on terror.”

The report says it is an analysis of the same data that was used for a February 2006 report that has become a major irritation to military officials. That report has become the foundation for assertions that Guantánamo imprisons harmless men under extreme conditions.

The 2006 report was prepared by the Seton Hall University School of Law and by two lawyers who represent detainees — Mark P. Denbeaux, a law professor there, and his son and law partner, Joshua W. Denbeaux.

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The new report uses the same data to rebut the terrorist rights lawyers. In the media battle space the then enemy and its useful idiots have dominated most reports so far. Hopefully this will help turn around that problem, but the military and the administration have been behind the OODA loop on the detainee issue from the time they landed in Gitmo.

There is a real need to challenge the perceptions pushed by the terrorist rights groups are these killers will be released to terrorize as many people as they can.