Released Gitmo detainees implicated in terror attacks on Americans

According to the Washington Post, at least twelve detainees released from the U.S. Navy's prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba attacked Americans in Afghanistan. The Post claims at least six are dead from these attacks. The attacks were primarily directed at U.S. military personnel, but at least one American aid worker is also dead. Many of the more than 600 detainees released since the U.S. began housing prisoners in Cuba have returned to or entered militancy -- the twelve are just a portion of the total who were able to attack American citizens abroad.

A Pentagon report from May 2009 suggested that one in seven of the 534 prisoners transferred out of the camp by that time turned (or returned) to terrorism or some other kind of radicalism. At that time, President Obama had plans to close the prison facility at Guantanamo, but strong opposition in the U.S. Senate voted 90-6 to cut the $80 million Obama needed to implement the shutdown.

The same Pentagon report released by the New York Times in 2009 found that fourteen percent of released Gitmo detainees return to terrorism or homegrown radicalism. By 2014, CNN found that number had grown to 17 percent. The rates of recidivism among these detainees is far, far lower than the average U.S. prisoner. In the U.S. prison system, parolees lapse back into criminal behavior at much higher rates, as high as sixty percent.

Then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller stated that moving the prisoners to U.S. soil comes with an increased terror threat. Michele A. Flournoy, who was then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and is now Hillary Clinton's presumptive nominee for Secretary of Defense, believes some of the detainees may need to end up in the United States. The closing of the prison in Cuba is likely shelved for the foreseeable future, given that no one knows what to do with the prisoners still housed there.

The 2016 report from the Director of National Intelligence estimates 17.5 percent of the total 676 released detainees since 2002 returned to the battlefield. Half of the total returning militants are now dead or in custody with foreign governments. The 2016 DNI Report does not include the numbers of Americans or American troops killed in action against former detainees.