About a dozen released Guantánamo inmates have been involved in attacks that killed about a half dozen Americans including one civilian, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
The report expands on a statement by senior Pentagon official Paul Lewis, who told lawmakers in March that some former inmates at the American prison facility on the island of Cuba had killed Americans since their release.
Citing current and former U.S. officials, the Post reported that most of those killed in the attacks were American military personnel, but they did include a female American aid worker who was killed in Afghanistan in 2008. These attacks were all done by inmates who had been released by the Bush administration.
Officials did not reveal exact numbers, but an official told the newspaper that the number of former detainees involved was less than 15 and that nine of the suspects are now dead or in foreign custody.
The information has not been released publicly because it is classified. As the Post notes, a House Armed Services Committee report from 2012 said that defense officials stopped releasing the names of recidivists in 2009 because officials were said to be concerned about revealing intelligence-gathering information.
The Post also offered some fascinating details on historic recidivism numbers out of Guantánamo:
Administration officials say that recidivism rates for released Guantanamo inmates remain far lower than those for federal offenders. According to a recent study, almost half of all federal offenders released in 2005 were “rearrested for a new crime or rearrested for a violation of supervision conditions.” Among former Guantanamo detainees, the total number of released detainees who are suspected or confirmed of reengaging is about 30 percent, according to U.S. intelligence.
Nearly 21 percent of those released prior to 2009 have reengaged in militancy, officials say, compared with about 4.5 percent of the 158 released by Obama.
Human rights activists say the statistics are suspect and cannot be verified because the administration provides almost no information about whom it is counting and why.
Most of those suspected of re-engagement are Afghan, reflecting the large numbers of Afghans detained after the Sept. 11 attacks and the ongoing war there. More than 200 Afghan prisoners have been repatriated from the prison.
As the Post reports, a little less than 700 detainees have been released from Gitmo since 2002 when the prison was created and there are 80 inmates still left there, including some of those involved in the planning of the 9/11 terrorists attack such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
The Post reports that the civilian killed was either Cydney Mizell, “a 50-year-old employee of the Asian Rural Life Development Foundation,” or Nicole Dial, a 30-year-old “Trinidadian American who worked for the International Rescue Committee, was shot and killed [in 2008] south of Kabul, along with two colleagues.”
Barack Obama promised at the start of his presidency to close the prison but has faced stiff resistance from Congress and has yet to do so.
