RECIDIVISM

This is a just a brief Post (I’ll be putting up some Shanley and Comstock material shortly).

Andy Worthington is a UK writer who has been following the Guantanamo situation. In this piece he dissects the government’s recent attempt to claim a high rate of recidivism among released Gitmo inmates as justification for everything it has done there.

As you can see if you follow the hyperlink to Worthington’s article, the government has inflated and mis-represented the ‘recidivism’ among the released inmates – claiming that a large proportion of them have returned to ‘terrorism’ once they got out. And, of course, that such a recidivism rate both justifies what the government has done to them and would somehow like to continue doing to them.

But the numbers were false – not to put too fine a point on it.

And there remains the monstrous conceptual question of categorization: how do you distinguish a ‘genuine’ terrorist from somebody who simply takes up resistance against what he sees (hardly irrationally) as the invasion of his country? Or how do you distinguish a ‘genuine’ terrorist from somebody who was literally ‘sold’ to Western forces by a rival or somebody with a grudge, in exchange for hefty cash rewards?

It struck me that these issues are all familiar to the SO community.

Further, that these types of gambits were first developed in the sex-offender mania years. And with almost total legislative and judicial backing.

Which means that their presence here in the foreign-policy (and foreign war) arena indicates that they have ‘migrated’, as the Beltway might put it. The Beltway folks saw how ‘successful’ the sex-offense mania has been and decided to use some of the same tricks in other areas of activity.

In case you ever have any doubts about the overall value – and downright urgency – of working to dissolve this mania.