Six months after the Bush era officially ended, the prison at Guantanamo Bay still causes controversy. President Obama has vowed to close the prison by 2010, while Dick Cheney continues to insist to anyone listening that the US will be at greater risk of an Al Qaeda attack if Guantanamo closes.

In a May speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Cheney cited Pentagon figures that 14%, or one in seven, of released Guantanamo detainees rejoined the fight in the Middle East or Central Asia against American interests.

But New America’s Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann have set about debunking that particular claim. Relying on a careful analysis of open source information and the information available from the Pentagon, Bergen and Tiedemann recently found that only about 4% of detainees have actively taken up arms against the United States since their release.

This work is useful not only because it helps flesh out the threat level from released detainees, but also because Bergen and Tiedemann fisk the Pentagon’s sometimes questionable methodology for determining recidivism.

They write:

Some may argue that even if 1 percent of the men released from Guantanamo go on to commit violence against the United States or U.S. interests, the number would be too high. Others may observe that, in comparison, recidivism rates among convicted criminals in the United States are much higher than any of the Pentagon estimates or tallies concerning the former detainees.

We make a different point: That the Pentagon should be as precise and transparent as possible in ascertaining how many of those released from Guantanamo have posed any kind of threat to the United States and U.S. interests. Whether it is 14 percent, as the Pentagon fact sheet would indicate, or more like 4 percent, as our analysis suggests, the number has implications for how legislators and other policy makers address the problems and challenges posed by the proposed closure of the prison.

This is a crucial point, one often ignored in Washington; when making decisions about important policy considerations, transparency and forthrightness actually help policy makers devise better solutions. Amazing.

-- Andrew Lebovich