AP has a piece on Gitmo's Penny Lane facility, where detainees were recruited to be double agents before they were released to infiltrate al Qaeda. Emma Roller points out the flip side of this story:
And hey, remember all those stories about former prisoners returning to militancy that the rightwing liked to point to as evidence that no further detainees should be released? How many of those returning militants were really double agents?
The irony of the story is palpable: While the CIA set some actual terrorists free as double agents, other Gitmo prisoners who face no formal charges, like Mohamed Ould Slahi, remain in habeas corpus purgatory.The AP story is based on off the record interviews of "nearly a dozen current and former U.S officials." So why are they talking now? Won't this ruin any double agents they currently have out there? I mean, if I were a member of a terrorist cell and read this story, I would suspect any former detainee in my cell. Maybe the usefulness of the double agents is now being overshadowed by concerns about former detainees militancy who aren't secretly working for the U.S.?
And hey, remember all those stories about former prisoners returning to militancy that the rightwing liked to point to as evidence that no further detainees should be released? How many of those returning militants were really double agents?
