HASC Reengagement Report--A Few Thoughts

I have only flipped through the House Armed Services subcommittee report entitled, "Leaving Guantanamo: Policies, Pressures, and Detainees Returning to the Fight," and I find I have little to say about it. It is a remarkably uninteresting document, whose major "findings" could not possibly have required a year-long investigation to state. Did we really need a major congressional investigation to learn, for example, this?

Mechanisms to reduce the GTMO population were first contemplated when the facility was established in 2002. However, procedures to accomplish this took about eight months to finalize, and were spurred by persistent concerns that some detainees should not be held.

Surely we didn't need a congressional subcommittee to tell us, of all things, that

After the first review process began, political and diplomatic pressures to reduce the GTMO population arose, resulting in releases and transfers.

And who, for the love of God, with even the most passing familiarity with the history of Guantanamo needed to be told this?

Pressures to reduce the GTMO population accelerated in the second Bush term, before reengagement dangers became fully apparent.

There does, throughout the document, seem to be an unexamined set of working assumptions: that transfers are bad, that the political pressures that generated them are regrettable, and that the costs of detainee reengagement are unacceptable next to the benefits transfers have brought and next to the costs of not having serious processes for managing the size of the detainee population. I have some sympathy with the minority members in their argument that these assumptions warrant examination. That said, my larger critique of this report--at least on initial inspection--is that it is trivial. I will write about the report further only if further reading convinces me that this judgment is unfair.