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US study portrays Guantanamo inmates as threat
See? It's just the "study", "portraying" all those poor shepherds and students as a "threat". Agence France Presse has nearly exhausted its annual supply of sneer quotes:
Nah - Chirac designated them a critical national industry. There are scads of damp limestone caves incubating them by the thousands ... whole piles of white, eyeless squirming grubs eating decaying French pride, moldy cheese rinds and the dregs of wine grapes. When they change over to their black flying form the skies are darkened for hours and the only thing the cow milk is good for is bad cheese, for days thereafter.
A new report commissioned by the US Defense Department argues inmates held at the Guantanamo detention camp in 2004 and 2005 posed a clear threat to US forces.

The report, by a center at the US Military Academy at West Point, runs counter to the picture painted by human rights groups and other critics who have charged that most detainees held at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba are harmless and not linked to Al-Qaeda, the New York Times said on Thursday. Based on an analysis of information presented at military hearings for the detainees, the report found that 73 percent of inmates represented a "demonstrated threat" to US and allied forces, the Times wrote. And 95 percent were at minimum a "potential threat," including detainees who had played supporting roles in terrorist groups or had expressed a commitment to extremist goals, the report said, according to the Times.

The detainees included men who had been fighters with Al-Qaeda, attended terrorist training camps and had experience with explosives, sniper rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, the report said.
Nope, none of them a threat, nope, send 'em home to Wazoo ...
The study was written by the evil warmongers at the Combating Terrorism Center at the West Point military academy, which according to its website is "actively involved in supporting the global war on terror through education, research and policy analysis."

A previous analysis of the same evidence presented at military hearings by the right sort of people at Seton Hall University School of Law came to a much different conclusion. The Seton Hall report found that only eight percent of detainees had been described by the US military as Al-Qaeda fighters and that 55 percent had not committed any hostile acts against the United States.
Though 100 percent of those had been planning to do so.
The reports are based on hearings called combatant status review tribunals that decide whether detainees should be held as "enemy combatants."

The Pentagon-sponsored report includes specific criticism of the Seton Hall study, saying it ignored the context of the some information on detainees and engaged in speculation, the newspaper said. While the report comes as the Pentagon seeks to shape domestic and international attitudes toward the camp, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Felter, director of the Combating Terrorism Center, told the Times it was an independent evaluation and carried out without Pentagon supervision. But Felter added: "They had been getting a lot of inquiries related to this previous study... They had a lot of concerns with the conclusions, but they did not have another study."

The United States still holds about 375 detainees at the camp after opening the prison in January 2001 as part of its "war on terror."
Posted by: Seafarious 2007-07-27
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=194587