Gitmo Recidivism and Innocence

I certainly agree with Adam Serwer's point in this post that it will be mindless and destructive if Republicans really tried to prevent transfers from Guantanamo. Along the way, however, Adam makes the following point which warrants a brief response:

Almost 800 people have been imprisoned at Gitmo, whereas there are only about 170 detainees left. The vast majority were released under Bush, and even the exaggerated government "recidivism" rate pegs detainees who have become involved in terrorism since at 20 percent, or 1/3 of the recidivism rate for prisoners in the U.S. Either Gitmo has some really serious rehabilitative qualities or the vast majority of those imprisoned their were innocent.

This is becoming a pretty common argument on the Left, related conceptually to the even-more common argument that releases are themselves evidence of "innocence." (You know the trope: We held these detainees for years, never filed charges, and finally released them--proving they were wrongly detained the whole time.) Both arguments are analytically wrong. Many people reasonably detained at Guantanamo were foreign fighters who went to support, aid, and fight with the Taliban. They are not common criminals, and they may not even be terrorists either--at least not in the sense of people who are likely to detonate a car bomb in a village market. They are guys who got entranced with jihad and joined up with a particularly nasty militia that ended up fighting the U.S. and its allies. It should be no particular surprise that, when released, they go home and demobilize at much higher rates than the rate at which common criminals turn from the life. That does not mean their detentions were unjustified. And it doesn't make them "innocent"; indeed, innocence and guilt are not really the relevant concepts here at all. It means simply that the military took a calculated risk that the threat they posed could be handled by means other than detention, and the risk in many cases has paid off. Conservatives should not make it difficult for the administration to take these risks. They are important. But we also should not pretend they are not risks and that we're just freeing the innocent.