Al Qaeda in your ‘hood

If they’re “non-threatening,” why won’t their home countries allow them to come back?

Others will be released into a neighborhood near you if they are in danger of being tortured if they are sent back home. So apparently the prospect of Americans being tortured by the detainees is just fine, while the thought of the detainees being tortured by their own governments is too horrible to contemplate. Blair made a humanitarian case, saying that the released prisoners would even receive welfare benefits, and explaining, “We can’t put them out on the street.” Why, of course not – unless, apparently, it’s a street in an American city.

But Americans won’t really be in any danger, will they? After all, the only detainees who will be on their way to your town will be the “non-threatening” ones, right? “Blair,” AP noted, “said the U.S. government is building dossiers on each of the prisoners at Guantanamo.” Well, then, the folks in Des Moines and Dubuque can rest easy! After all, if the government is compiling dossiers, what could go wrong? Surely they won’t allow any potentially harmful jihadist to roam free in the United States, will they?

Well, let’s look at the record. How have others released from Gitmo turned out? In December 2007 the U.S. government released an Afghan citizen named Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul and returned him to Afghanistan. Social workers will be happy to learn that since his release from Gitmo, Rasoul, now known as Mullah Abdullah Zakir, has found gainful employment: as the new chief operations officer for the Taliban in the southern part of Afghanistan, he is keeping busy waging jihad warfare against American troops.

Likewise Abu Sufyan al-Azdi al-Shahri, formerly Guantanamo prisoner number 372, is now a leader of Al-Qaeda in Yemen. Abu al-Hareth Muhammad al-Oufi, once found at Gitmo as prisoner number 333, is now an Al-Qaeda field commander in the same country. However, another former inmate, Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi, will not make the Gitmo detainees’ reunion bash: he blew himself up in a suicide attack in Iraq in May 2008.

Pentagon spokesman Commander Jeffrey Gordon revealed several years ago that Guantanamo prisoners captured in Afghanistan had claimed to be anything but jihad fighters – they had all been picked up by mistake, and were humble cooks, farmers, truck drivers, small businessmen, and the like. “Non-threatening” occupations all! Once released, however, “we are aware of dozens of cases where they have returned to militant activities, participated in anti-US propaganda or engaged in other activities,” said Gordon. The Pentagon announced in January that 61 former Guantanamo inmates had returned to the jihad – not just to distributing “anti-US propaganda,” but to involvement in outright terrorist activity.

Even rehabilitation programs for Guantanamo inmates haven’t worked. According to a UPI report last February, “Saudi officials said the 11 former Guantanamo Bay detainees underwent a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists and are thought to have fled the country, joining terrorist groups elsewhere.” Apparently Saudi rehab for jihadists isn’t exactly the Betty Ford clinic.

The plan to release Guantanamo inmates in the United States as free men has to be evaluated in light of the fact that the government’s track record on releasing prisoners from Gitmo has not been exactly stellar. The Obama Administration’s solicitude for the plight of these prisoners fails to take into account the fact that nothing is done now or has been done in the past at Guantanamo to disabuse detainees there of the beliefs and assumptions that led them to wage war against the United States in the first place. Accordingly, what assurance can Obama or Dennis Blair give us that these men will not return to the jihad in the American city in which they’ve been released?