Washington, February 03: The White House claims that 20 percent of the former detainees discharged from the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison camp have returned to anti-US battlefields around the world.
In a letter to the speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, the White House acknowledged that the intelligence community assesses that 20 percent of the detainees transferred from Guantanamo are confirmed or suspected of engaging in “recidivist activity.”
According to the letter by Barack Obama’s counterterrorism advisor John Brennan, the 20 percent includes 9.6 percent of released detainees and 10.4 percent of those whom the US intelligence ‘suspects’ of returning to anti-American engagements.
Among the detainees known to have returned to terrorism, the US claims, are some who joined al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a terror group based in Yemen that claimed responsibility for planning a failed Christmas Day attack on an American airliner in Detroit International Airport.
In early January, Obama pledged that he would not return the detainees released from Guantanamo to Yemen until the “unsettled situation” in the impoverished Arab nation gets resolved.
The contents of Brennan’s letter, first reported by broadcaster ABC News, notes that all the known cases of former Guantanamo detainees joining terrorist groups involved prisoners released by the former George W. Bush’s administration.
———Agencies