McCain, Scalia and Yoo Peddle Discredited "Gitmo 30" Sound Bite

from Perspectives

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, Bush administration torture architect John Yoo thundered against the Supreme Court's restoration of habeas corpus rights for Guantanamo detainees. Branding the Boumediene decision "judicial imperialism of the highest order," Yoo like Justice Scalia and John McCain raised the specter of those 30 released Gitmo terrorists as a warning of the carnage the Court's ruling is certain to produce. Alas, as with so much else passing over John Yoo's lips, it simply isn't true.

As I detailed yesterday, the figure of 30 former Guantanamo detainees "returned to the fight" has been debunked by recent investigations from the McClatchy papers and Seton Hall University professor Mark Denbeaux. But that hasn't stopped the exaggerated number of Gitmo terror recidivists from becoming a standard Republican talking point.

The sound bite dates back to the summer of 2007, when the Pentagon released its own study to counter an earlier analysis by Denbeaux which questioned the intelligence value of Al Qaeda and Taliban personnel held by the U.S. The New York Times said "it paints a chilling portrait of the detainees," and quoted Pentagon spokesman Jeffrey Gorden on one of its key findings:

"Our reports indicate that at least 30 former Guantanamo detainees have taken part in anti-coalition militant activities after leaving U.S. detention," he said. "Some have been killed in combat in Afghanistan and Pakistan."

(Continued here.)