Bloggers' Roundtable With Gen. Douglas M. Stone

And we feel comfortable enough that we can conduct a panel of officers looking at both the intelligence side and the open source information that we have on these guys, all the results of their interrogation, the results of their course work and how they participated in the -- while they were in the theater internment facilities, and then make some recommendations as to their release.

And I think probably the most exciting information is, we've not had anybody return in the 4 1/2 months of doing this program. So we've not had one returnee or recapture out of this program, where we would have expected the number to be about 6.4 percent. In fact, it's interesting; the period of time from January to when we started this program, January to May, that group exceeded 2.4 percent in terms of recapture, so that we -- if we had continued with mass release or without the program, we would have ended up with, I think, a number that probably would have approached 7 or 8 percent recapture. And obviously, what I'm trying to do is get us down to the lowest possible number. And as soon as we have jobs for these guys, we'll probably take that thing down well under 1 percent.

That's kind of my opening comments.

Holt: Excellent. Sounds like progress being made, sir. Thank you very much.

We've got Matt Armstrong on the line. So Matt, you were first on the line, why don't you get us started?

Q: Thank you. General, when we spoke last time -- sorry, that static's my end. When we spoke last time when you were in this forum, I didn't mention that you and I had actually met at the ONR-F&T conference last year, and --

Stone: Hello, Matt. How are you doing?

Q: I'm good. I'm good. Thanks. And it's -- I mean, you were extremely innovative there, and it's great to see you innovative where you are now.

I have a question. It's kind of left field, I guess, in the general sense of this forum, but it's a question about how you're running the prisons and how you're looking for how you might be doing it in the future. There's a number of people that are looking for robots to augment or even replace humans in prisoner management. The idea is that you take emotions out of the loop and you prevent things like Abu Ghraib in the future -- not that you have anything like that that's going on there. But there are people that are thinking that robots would help prevent that, et cetera, and you can put war fighters back out on the line.

What are your thoughts on that?

Stone: Well, you know, I'm in the battlefield of the mind right now. The basic care and custody that takes place is done in a very large compound, thousand-person compounds. Now we're -- I think if we were -- if you were on the last time, you might have heard me say we are trying to change that configuration to modular detainee housing units. If we were able to get them into smaller organization -- not necessarily -- smaller configurations, then I think you've got yourself into a physical management problem that's different than these compounds, and robotics, I think, would make a lot of sense.

You know, you certainly could use robotics for perimeter protection or perimeter identification for sensing a lot of things that, you know -- I'd have to back up and, you know, grab a hold of all my robotics background and kind of dig in and sort of see where things are at, but I can see if the physical environment is right how you could use them. But right now, remember, my top priority is obviously to ensure that care and custody is done, but it's also to determine if this detainee is an imperative security risk. That's the only authority under which I'm allowed to hold them, and if I determine that they're no longer a security risk, then I -- you know, I let them go.