GITMO Project

Captain Ed Morrisey (of Captain’s Quarters blog) is trying to harness the minds in blogosphere to analyze a small mountain of paperwork about the prisoners at GITMO. This paperwork was just released publicly by the Department of Defense. Shortly after the paperwork was released, two lawyers for some of the GITMO prisoners (Mark and Joshua Denbeaux) released a study purporting to analyze the released paperwork.

From the study by Mark and Joshua Denbeaux:

1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.

2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.

3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed “fighters for;” 30% considered “members of;” a large majority - 60% - are detained merely because they are “associated with” a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners, a nexus to any terrorist group is not identified by the Government.

4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.

5. Finally, the population of persons deemed not to be enemy combatants - mostly Uighers - are in fact accused of more serious allegations than a great many persons still deemed to be enemy combatants.

One might reasonably expect the lawyers for such defendants to make a case for their detention being unjustified. <sarcasm> Therefore one might also reasonably expect that a study by such attorneys might be the tiniest bit biased </sarcasm>. On the other hand, the circumstances of the “detainees” at GITMO are murky enough that I’d like to know myself what’s really going on there. And so would Captain Ed:

From Captain Ed:

In order for a study to have credibility, the results have to be replicable. That means that another group would have to spend the time to review and tally the same data that the Denbeauxs analyzed and determine if their numbers add up the same. Unfortunately, that sounds a little ambitious for one blogger. However, my good friend King Banaian at SCSU Scholars suggested to me that a blogswarm review — such as the one that Hugh Hewitt ran for the review of the John Roberts documentation — would work quickly through the stack of paperwork presented by the DoD.

What I propose is to have bloggers volunteer to review the data in the PDF files at the DoD link. We need to tally the SOEs to see how many include allegations of hostile acts, the type of affiliation for each detainee, and whether the SOE included mitigating information (found in Paragraph 4). Rather than look just for 3b, we need to review all of Paragraph 3 for the complete context of the threat presented by each detainee, at least according to the SOE.

This sounded like a worthy effort to me, so I signed up. Captain Ed sent me my assignment, which I’ve returned, with this comment:

After scanning this summary it was obvious that, as I expected, there was not enough information to reach an independent judgment. So I adopted this attitude as I read: I accepted the statements of fact as facts, and I interpreted as best I could any descriptions of what people actually said. I then made my best judgment as to the items you asked us to tabulate, based on the belief I had after reading the whole SOE. Most of these judgments could easily be debated by reasonable people, of course.

I feel like I’ve just taken a look at an alien (to me) culture from some distance, using a poor telescope. I was struck by the repeated descriptions of “recruitment” into jihad by religious figures. How strange, and frightening, such religious fervor! But these summaries are so shallow (as summaries usually are) that one cannot get any sense of the actual people (the “detainees", I mean) — though it was easy to see, in some cases, the hostility of the officer writing up the summary, especially in some of the cases where the detainees have exhibited awful behavior in GITMO.

One thing that jumped out at me: the mitigations nearly all fall into one of two categories — either a simple denial (e.g., “I was not an Al Qaida"), or completely irrelevant (e.g., “If released I will go home to my farm and get married."). The denials are not really informative, as (obviously) either a guilty or an innocent party is likely to deny the crime. To me, this basically complete absence of legitimate mitigating factors is the most compelling argument for bias in the process. If the process was fair, I’d expect to see things like “My good friend Dave is American” or “Here are the other five religious missions I went on before I was accidentally caught up in this mess in Afghanistan”. But those are not there at all. Of course, the alternative explanation for the absence of legitimate mitigating factors is that they are genuinely missing — because the detainees are in fact guilty — and that the U.S. officers acting on their behalf stretched hard to find the few mitigating factors they did list. I hope like hell its the latter (and the other evidence for guilt inclines me that way), but I don’t see a way to prove it from the SOEs…

This was a very interesting exercise to participate in, and I eagerly await the results. My little piece of the exercise was far too small a sample to draw any conclusions from.

If you’re interested in seeing some of the raw data yourself, they’re publicly available here.