Guantanamo Detainees By The Numbers

Here are some interesting statistics. The lead for the story is that 3 Guantanamo Detainees [Were] Freed on the grounds that they "no longer pose a threat to the United States or its allies." But what was to me more interesting was the context. According to the article:

752 people have been detained at Guantanamo since January 2002.
538 of these have had hearings into whether they were, in fact, enemy combatants
520 of these were found to have been properly detained
162 have had hearings into whether the were still a threat
159 were found to be a continuing threat
41 have been released (38 wrongly detained and 3 who were no longer a threat)
201 have been trensferred to other countries
510 are still in custody at Guantanamo

One thing that impresses me about these numbers is the very small percentage of "mistakes" the government has made. Out of a toal population of 752, only 38 (5%) have been found to have been wrongly detained. Given that most of these people were detained under combat conditions or other conditions not conducive to a measured consideration of evidence and probable cause, "getting it right" 95% of the time is pretty impressive. Assuming, of course, you belive that the status hearings do accurately distinguish those who are enemy combatants from those who are not. The other possibility, of course is that, in all but the most egregious cases, the combatant status hearing are pretty much a rubber stamp of the original determination that brought the detainee to Guantanamo in the first place. I'd like to believe the former, but my instinct tells me that it is unlikely that the original determinations were 95% accurate -- which leads inevtiably to the suspicion that the status hearings may not be as much af a search for truth as one would hope. (Toungue stuck firmly in cheek).

The threat assessment results are also interesting. Presumably, all 162 of the people who have had such hearings have previously had combatant status hearings and have been determined to have been "enemy combatants." If you believe that those determinations were accurate, what is amazing is that anyone has been found to no longer be a threat. If the person was prepared to do the US harm when he got to Guantanamo, what could have happened there to change his mind? Has 3 years of incarceration caused them to see the error of their ways? And, in any event, what possible assurance could they provide on that score that would satisfy DOD? The facts are admittedly scanty, and perhaps there are other explanations, but what seems most likely here is that the 3 never were a threat and probably shouldn't have been detained to begin with.

In high school (maybe it was even grade school), I remember learning that a fundamental premise of the American criminal justice system was that it was better to have 99 guilty men go free than to imprison one innocent man. The advent of DNA testing has pretty much given the lie to any idea that this was how things worked in practice. Still, it was a principle to which I think most of us aspired to have our system meet. But, it appears that the 9/11 attacks killed that principle even as an aspiration. I have no doubt that there are many at Guantanamo who pose a threat to American lives and property. Sadly, even if they did not pose such a threat when they were detained, they probably do now. Three years of imprisonment by a foreign, infidel power has an inevitable tendency to radicalize people who probably needed no additional motivation to hate America any way. So, at some level, I can understand the impetus to keep them all locked up. It's just safer that way. But I also wonder if we aren't doing to ourselves more damage than they could ever do.