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Nawaz Offers Views on Changing Pakistani Perceptions of U.S.
Shuja Nawaz, Director of the Atlantic Council's South Asia Center, was interviewed on The Takeaway morning radio news program on the Pakistan flood situation. The discussion focused on the U.S. being the single largest donor of aid, and the potential for Pakistanis to shift their perceptions of America. However, Nawaz warns of the long-term effects of America's goodwill, stating that "changing image takes a long time."
South Asia Center's Shikha Bhatnagar Spotlighted
Shikha Bhatnagar's recent appointment as Associate Director of the South Asia Center of the Atlantic Council, is yet another manifestation of a growing trend of second generation Indian Americans' advent into leading Washington, DC think tanks as senior policy analysts and associates.
Chuck Hagel Discusses START Ratification on RussiaToday
Atlantic Council Chairman Chuck Hagel was interviewed for RussiaToday on delays in ratification of the START treaty in both the U.S. and Russia.
FEATURED ISSUE
In August the sunny calm and quiet that is a Swedish summer will be shattered by the impact of Joint Direct Attack Munitions dropped by F-16CM Fighting Falcons from US Air Force Europe.
Gitmo 'Recidivism' Claims Don't Stand Scrutiny
James Joyner | January 16, 2009
Earlier this week, I reported on the U.S. Defense Department's claims that as many as 61 former Guantanimo detainees had returned to terrorism. My friend Steve Hynd, who blogs at Newshoggers and elsewhere, passes along a rather convincing rejoinder from Michael J. Ricciardelli of the Seton Hall Law Center for Policy & Research.
Professor Denbeaux of the Center for Policy & Research has said that the Center has determined that “DOD has issued “recidivism” numbers fourty-three times, and each time they have been wrong—this last time the most egregiously so.”
Denbeaux stated: “Once again, they’ve failed to identify names, numbers, dates, times, places, or acts upon which their report relies. Every time they have been required to identify the parties, they have been forced to retract their false ID’s and their numbers. They have included people who have never even set foot in Guantanamo —much less were they released from there. They have counted people as “returning to the fight” for having written an Op-ed piece in the New York Times and for having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival. They have revised and retracted their internally conflicting definitions, criteria, and their numbers so often that they have ceased to have any meaning— except as an effort to sway public opinion by painting a false portrait of the supposed dangers of these men.
Fourty-three times they have given numbers—which conflict with each other—all of which are seriously undercut by the DOD statement that “they do not track” former detainees. Rather than making up numbers “willy-nilly” about post release conduct, America might be better served if our government actually kept track of them.”
That strikes me as a reasonable request. To be sure, there are national security issues at stake. "Sources and methods" and all that. But, surely, if DoD knows that a specific terrorist, once in U.S. custody, is back in action against American soldiers, there's no harm in telling us that and providing some modicum of evidence.
James Joyner is managing editor of the Atlantic Council. AP Photo by Haraz N. Ghanbari.
Comments
Why would we even argue about it? Is there any doubt that these people will go back to their side of the fight?? That is exactly why we should execute each one of them and close the station. We don't need a prison for war crimes unless we go around capturing people who are trying to attack us. You kill those people, not capture, try, and imprison them. Either that or you ultimately get your butt kicked by them.
I know this is way after the fact, but the actual data on this can be found here:
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dr6mzdw_5g947vcdv
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