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CBS' David Martin claimed an Exclusive for his access to the latest estimates made by the Pentagon's spies. The Defense Intelligence Agency has tracked 550 former inmates at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base to measure their current levels of militancy. More than 450 pose no problem; almost 100 are "confirmed or suspected of what the Pentagon calls terrorist activities," according to Martin.
So why did Martin embellish that finding? He quoted defense lawyers as arguing that "indefinite detention without being convicted of any crime drives them to terrorism" yet he ignored that point by asserting that all had "gone back to terrorism." How does Martin know that none was innocent when arrested and converted to terrorism by their experience of abuse? He quoted Juan Zarate, his network's in-house terrorism consultant, describing the latest batch of released inmates as being "harder core, more tied to the terrorist networks and more ideologically committed." So Zarate implies that the early releases were indeed more likely to have been innocent when first captured.
When Martin did the math to assert an 18% recidivism rate he was in effect converting the DIA's "confirmed or suspected" category to a declarative "confirmed." Of the "nearly 100 former detainees back in the fight," Martin told us definitively about only three: one suicide bomber, one commander of Taliban guerrillas in southern Afghanistan, and the chief of the Taliban's military committee.
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