THE Pentagon now confirms that at least 74 former Guantanamo detainees have resumed terror ist activities after claiming they weren't terrorists.Read the rest if you want to become really depressed this afternoon. And don't forget to send a word of thanks to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and their merry band of idiots who helped make this happen.
Such recidivism points up an alarming intelligence failure.
These dangerous prisoners should never have been cleared for release. Why did interrogators fail to find the cracks in their stories and alibis?
Why wasn't more intelligence gathered to predict they'd rejoin al Qaeda or the Taliban?
In a word, politics. Gitmo interrogations have been emasculated to placate critics of waterboarding and other "torture," say two senior officials there.
Even known terrorists are spared high-pressure techniques -- tactics that have worked before in squeezing out information.
For that matter, Gitmo doesn't even do "interrogations" anymore. They're now called interviews, and they're voluntary.
Many recidivists used the interviews as an opportunity to argue for release, spinning familiar excuses for why they were in Afghanistan after 9/11. They were freed after interrogators, many of them inexperienced, for the most part bought their sob stories and review boards judged them least likely to return to jihad.
"We have on numerous occasions gotten literally straight-from-the-schoolhouse interrogators who are being stuck in with these hardened jihadists," a top security official at Gitmo told me. "And they essentially look at them and laugh."
He says many are 19-year-olds who lack battlefield skills and don't understand the first thing about jihad and militant Islam.
"They get played by detainees, who end up getting released because the interrogators believe them when they say they don't know anything and just want to go home and be a goat herder," he says.
As a condition of their release, the Gitmo detainees signed pledges to renounce violence and enroll in "reintegration programs" in countries that agreed to repatriate them.
Terrorist Said Ali al-Shihri went through the resort-like Saudi program after his release in 2007.
Afterward, he helped plan last year's deadly attack on the US Embassy in Yemen as al Qaeda's operations chief there.
Another Gitmo recidivist, Slimane Hadj Abderahmane, laughed at the anti-violence agreement he signed. Once free, he re-engaged in terror and said, "This document is toilet paper for the Americans if they want it."
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