December 30th, 2009:

Re:  Likely casualty of air plot: Obama’s Guantanamo plans | McClatchy 

Maximum Security Prison at Thomson, Illinois

 

The foiled Christmas Day plot to blow up a jetliner over Detroit has thrown up a major roadblock to President Barack Obama’s pledge to close the prison camps at Guantanamo. 

The author speaks of a political roadblock, not a real, practical one. The right-wing nut jobs are stomping their feet again about how we cannot close the Guantanamo prison because some of the prisoners might reoffend. But the truth is that a great majority of the murderers and rapists and child molesters that serve their time and are set free reoffend again and again. The recidivism rate in the US is high and keeps getting higher. The following information is from the US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs: 

Recidivism is measured by criminal acts that resulted in the rearrest, reconviction, or return to prison with or without a new sentence during a three-year period following the prisoner’s release. 

Summary findings 

• During 2007, a total of 1,180,469 persons on parole were at-risk of reincarceration.  This includes persons under parole supervision on January 1 or those entering parole during the year. Of these parolees, about 16% were returned to incarceration in 2007.
• Among nearly 300,000 prisoners released in 15 states in 1994, 67.5% were rearrested within 3 years. A study of prisoners released in 1983 estimated 62.5%.
• Of the 272,111 persons released from prisons in 15 states in 1994, an estimated 67.5% were rearrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within 3 years, 46.9% were reconvicted, and 25.4% resentenced to prison for a new crime.
• These offenders had accumulated 4.1 million arrest charges before their most recent imprisonment and another 744,000 charges within 3 years of release.
• Released prisoners with the highest rearrest rates were robbers (70.2%), burglars (74.0%), larcenists (74.6%), motor vehicle thieves (78.8%), those in prison for possessing or selling stolen property (77.4%), and those in prison for possessing, using, or selling illegal weapons (70.2%).
• Within 3 years, 2.5% of released rapists were arrested for another rape, and 1.2% of those who had served time for homicide were arrested for homicide.

Source: Recidivism of Prisoners Released in 1994 

We all know that some prisoners released will reoffend, no matter where they were incarcerated. Aside from psychological profiles that tell us who might reoffend, we have no way of telling who among them will actually do it. When there is no legal reasons to incarcerate a person, when there is no hard evidence that would warrant filling charges against that person, then they have to be released under US and Military law. 

The next obvious point here is the question, “Can’t our prisons hold Yemini prisoners as well as any other?” The new prison and the townsfolk in Thomson, Illinois seems to be perfectly capable of accepting the Yemini along with the others, so why should this lone,really ignorant, Yemini terrorist be a reason to halt plans to close Gitmo? 

Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) on FOX Entertainment this Sunday said, “But today it’s a first-class facility. It would be a mistake to send these 90 people back to Yemen, because based on the past of what’s happened when we’ve released people from Guantánamo, a certain number of them have gone back into the fight against us.” 

Politicians are good at misdirection, and Joe has tried it again here. There are no plans to send all 90 of the Yemini prisoners back to Yemen. There is, however, plans to send them to Illinois. Him and all the other Obama haters out there are jumping all over this as a reason to keep Guantanamo open. What does it matter if the prison there is closed? The right-wing whack-jobs think that by keeping the prison open that they will have defeated another of Obama’s plans never mind what’s good for America. Besides, Obama didn’t send the two men who planned the bombing back to Yemen, President Bush did. 

Officials say the White House is counting on congressional approval for its Illinois prison plan and that it has full confidence in Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, saying that the process is more thorough than the Bush administration’s, which released two detainees now linked to the Detroit airliner plot. 

ABC News identified the men as Mohamed al Harbi and Said al Shihri, both Saudi nationals who were repatriated to a rehabilitation program in the oil-rich kingdom in December 2007. They have reemerged as leaders of an al Qaeda offshoot in Yemen. 

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