Will You Have To Face This Threat - Again?

I recently read that the Pentagon was reported to have told Congress that it plans to release a dozen Guantanamo detainees to at least two countries. The Director of National Intelligence has recently said, since January 2009, five percent of Guantanamo prisoners have been released.

Is that important? I think so. The recidivism rate, or the rate of former detainees committing another crime upon release, is about ten percent, down from an earlier report which cited 21%, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

So one might think that this is good news - but you would probably only think that if you don’t wear a uniform and are not subject to additional deployments that might cause you to engage one of these individuals again. I say again, because someone in uniform already risked his/her life capturing these fanatics before - just for them to now be released. We are just going to let them go.

The decision to certify these releases is simple if you know that you will not have to stare down the barrel of an AK-47 or be wounded by an RPG or IED. It’s easy if you know that, after you leave office, you will have a full Secret Service protective detail, live in a house wired for any security threat, and that you will be financially secure for the remainder of your days.

Now view that decision looking through the eyes of an infantry soldier or a marine deployed multiple times, and finding that he is faced once more by the same terrorist that was in Gitmo ten years ago.

Let’s hope the one with the faster trigger finger is our infantry soldier. Maybe some will think this is an extreme example - but is it really? If the recidivism rate is as high as it appears, or perhaps is higher, and the rotations of soldiers to Afghanistan and Iraq continue or increase, then this isn’t an impossible scenario.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has released its latest statistics on the number of former Guantanamo detainees who are either confirmed or suspected of returning to the fight. As expected, there has been a slight increase in the number of ex-detainees who have re-joined the jihad. The ODNI says that a total of 196 ex-Gitmo detainees, or 30 percent of the 653 total detainees transferred or released, are now either confirmed or suspected of reengaging. The number of confirmed recidivists (117) outnumbers those on the suspected list (79). These figures are current as of July 15, 2015.

If they do not release these bad actors, then we will not have to face them down a second time. The answer is clear and unequivocal - stop releasing these terrorists!