Smoke without fire-All those jihadis who went back to the fight, not

Ah yes, remember the days when someone would come up with something that proved Saddam had nukes and then a few days later, the evidence would turn out to be, well, nothing really. Of course you don't if you are a normal American. Three minutes ago is ancient history here.
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Well, it is happening again. Not about WMD in Iraq but one of the other places we have troops. Granted, that's a lot of places. You remember that place we invaded after 911 and never left and is popping up in the news again. Yes, it's called Afghanistan.

Well, we scooped up a lot of lads and gave them a vacation in the sun drenched Caribbean where we treated them with kid gloves. Ah, well maybe we were a tad harsh with some. Still, if it is in a higher cause, what the heck.

Now John Brennan, the assistant to President Obama for homeland security and counterterrorism has written that, [T]he Intelligence Community assesses that 20 percent of detainees transferred from Guantánamo are confirmed or suspected of recidivist activity. I find that shocking. To tell you the truth, if I had been held for years against my will, I'd certainly be wanting to get back at the nation that jailed me.

The thing about the recidivist figures is that they are bunk. Over at the Future Of Freedom Commentaries, Andy Worthington exposes it in Repeating Pentagon Lies on Gitmo Recidivism. It seems that the figures were kinda fudged and repeated by the MSM. My apologies, I should have given a warning. I know those of you who believe that MSM member are killer fact checkers are going into shock.

The accounting is as creative as the Madoff team. It seems some of the former detainees went right back to the war by writing about it and were thus counted as just about to put petn down their undies. Per Andy,

We know, from earlier Pentagon claims, that this “recidivism” has included — and may well still include — publishing houses, the offices of newspapers, TV studios, and film sets because the Pentagon admitted (in a press release that was subsequently deleted from the Pentagon’s website, but is mirrored here) that it included former prisoners, like the Tipton Three — three young men from the West Midlands — who had appeared in a movie, The Road to Guantánamo, which dramatized their experiences, and the five Uighurs sent to Albania in 2006, after tribunals at Guantánamo cleared them of being “enemy combatants.” In the latter case, this was apparently because one of them, Abu Bakker Qassim, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times in which he urged U.S. lawmakers to defend habeas corpus.

In the years since, many more ex-prisoners have written books, newspaper articles, and op-eds, and have appeared on TV and in films. Perhaps Omar Deghayes, the British resident (released in 2007), who appeared in the Guantánamo documentary that I co-directed, Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo, has now joined this ever-expanding group of “recidivists” who have dared to use their words and their voices to “attack” the United States for what it did to them in its brutal, experimental prisons in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere.

Of course, If the pen is mightier than the sword, we may every right to be fearful. Being able to argue has to be defined as aggression.

No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up. Lily Tomlin, I think.