Somewhere to call my own. A doctor. A wife. A job. An apology. Some exercise videos. Crossword puzzles.

These are just a few of things, some banal, some fundamental, that the men I have been working with for the last five years have asked me for. I wonder if you can guess from this list who these men are? They are the men that Donald Rumsfeld uncharitably called “the worst of the worst”. Today, in the maelstrom gathering around the prisoner swap of Sergeant Bergdahl for five Taliban detainees at Guantánamo, the right has again begun to parrot Rumsfeld’s line. The reality, as I know, is that the vast majority of men who have been released without charge or trail from Guantánamo, are not itching to get back onto a putative battlefield—which they were never on in the first place—but are instead concerned about how to rebuild their lives after so much pain, and so many lost years.

Reprieve, the legal charity I work for, runs a UN-funded project called Life after Guantánamo, and we have worked with 30 men in 14 countries since President Obama first promised to close the prison in 2009. The men I know call me to ask my advice about how they can get married. They run different business ideas by me (from transporting cattle, to fruit exportation to mobile phone repairs). They ask for advice about language courses. They ask who could help pay for the medical and psychological treatment they need. There is sad news, and there are wonderful moments. They have lost their job because rumours got round that they had been in Guantánamo and the boss did not want to hire them anymore. The doctor at the local hospital tells them they don’t treat “terrorists”. But they also write or call to tell me that they have gotten married and had a new baby. They tell me that they have come top of their language class. They have seen the sea again for the first time in years, have gone fishing and caught an octopus.

None of this makes headlines. Instead the Director of National Intelligence reissues statistics on recidivism. Never mind that these are men who have never been charged with a crime, let alone had a trial, which makes a nonsense of the use of the term recidivism which implies a return to criminal activity. Behind the statistics, which are by any count far lower that the US crime recidivism rate, are the names which the DNI never releases. And behind the names are the people doing really very ordinary things.