White House Peddles Misinformation on Gitmo (updated)

Outside the Beltway, we call that LYING. By Daphne Eviatar via The Washington Independent:

Here’s a nice catch by Dafna Linzer at ProPublica. At yesterday’s press conference, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs made two statements about the Obama administration’s connection to the more than 200 Guantanamo detainees left at the prison camp.

First, Gibbs told reporters that more transfers of Guantanamo detainees out of the prison camp “have taken place in the past eight months than have taken — than took place in the previous eight years.”

Uh, wrong. As Linzer points out, the Obama administration has transferred 31 detainees in the last eight months, as compared to some 520 transferred by the Bush administration before that.

Gibbs also went on to claim that, when courts have ruled that the government is unlawfully holding a detainee, the Obama administration has transferred the detainees “back to either their home country or third-party countries.”

Well, not really. As of today, 11 detainees who’ve won the right to be released by a federal court are still imprisoned at Guantanamo, as we note on our Gitmo Habeas Scoreboard, posted earlier today.  We’ll continue to update that as developments occur.

It’s worth noting that not only has the Obama administration not complied with court orders for release, but when lawyers for the Chinese Muslim Uighurs detained at Gitmo won an order to be released into the United States — since they can’t go home to China and the U.S. hasn’t been able to place them all in other countries — the Obama administration fought back hard.

Do check out the Gitmo Habeas Scoreboard. The taxpayer-funded, liberal, Islamic terrorist’s defense appears to be  much more successful (32 wins) than the taxpayer-funded, government prosecution (9 wins) that is supposed to be protecting us.

The peddlers of misinformation at the DOJ have been held in contempt of court as well.

Update: Check out more peddling of misinformation on Gitmo in Josh Gerstein’s Politico post, A new (or old?) halt to Gitmo-Yemen transfers:

The administration’s claim that it had, before the Christmas Day bombing attempt, put a halt to Yemen repatriations is also curious, since The Washington Post suggested on its front page back on Dec. 18 that the release of the six was a “prelude” to further releases. Shouldn’t the White House have leapt up and said, “Actually, no, it isn’t”?

And when various members of Congress said we shouldn’t send any more detainees to Yemen in the foreseeable future (see here, here, here and here), shouldn’t the White House have leapt up and said, “We agree. Never planned to”?

It’s also curious that the fact that no more detainees would be sent to Yemen was being touted to reporters as a finding or result of the post-Christmas bombing intelligence review, if indeed such repatriations were halted “quietly several weeks ago.”