Guantanamo terrorists sent home to fight again

President Obama will miss his self-imposed deadline to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, but he’s still working to dump off terrorists on other countries before he brings some to U.S. soil. A couple it seems, are back in “countries” not recognized as real countries. How did this happen?

Thomas Joscelyn at The Weekly Standard posted on this subject yesterday afternoon and brings up some good questions. For this piece, Joscelyn focuses on the two detainees who were released to Somaliland, a country the United States – or anyone else for that matter – does not recognize or have official diplomatic relations with. That second link references Adam Brickley’s piece earlier yesterday.

From Brickley’s piece…

The Department of Justice announced Sunday that 12 detainees from Guantanamo Bay would be repatriated to Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somaliland.

That we are sending these people back to largely-lawless Afghanistan and terrorist-hotbed Yemen is bad, bad news. However, it’s the third country mentioned that’s really bothersome.

Technically speaking, Somaliland does not exist.

Don’t get me wrong — the Republic of Somaliland is a very real entity. It has a government that has been functioning relatively smoothly since declaring independence from Somalia in 1991. The problem, however, is that every nation on Earth (including the U.S.) recognizes the area as a non-independent part of Somalia. There are no diplomatic ties between Somaliland and…well…anyone, and the government is universally viewed as illegitimate.

And we are going to trust these people with two jihadist detainees from Guantanamo Bay?

On to Jocelyn, who writes about Abdullahi Sudi Arale.

In June 2007, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman called Arale a “high-value detainee.” That phrase was reserved for less than twenty detainees. As far as I know, the U.S. has never transferred a “high-value detainee” from its custody. One “high-value detainee,” Ahmed Ghailani, was transferred to New York for trial. But he is, of course, still detained by the U.S. Does this mean that Arale was the first “high-value detainee” ever transferred from American custody?

I’ll let you head over to Hot Air and Blackfive since Ed and Uncle Jimbo respectively have us all up-to-date with no comment from me needed. (It’s late, I’m tired…)

From Ed Morrissey…

Now he’s gone back to an area known to be a haven for terrorists — and under the control of a government with which the US doesn’t do business.  How exactly did that happen?  Somaliland is a breakaway piece of Somalia that no one recognizes.  Does the US usually extradite prisoners to jurisdictions that we do not recognize and in the absence of an extradition treaty?

The only thing more foolish than releasing terrorists is to release them in the middle of failed states.

From Uncle Jimbo, here and here.

This is not some poor bastard who was scarfed up in Afghanistan and sold to us by some warlord. We conducted a raid into Somalia specifically to capture this guy and now he is just back on the street? I kinda doubt it was the military changing their minds that he was a High Value Detainee, so we have the Attorney General and his friends in the terrorist fellow travelers camp to thank for this. Remind me again why any operator in the field would ever bring one of these bastards in alive again. Grab ‘em, give them a couple hours of field interrogation and then an unfortunate, failed escape attempt. This administration cannot be trusted with our security.

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Steve McGough

Steve's a part-time conservative blogger. Steve grew up in Connecticut and has lived in Washington, D.C. and the Bahamas. He resides in Connecticut, where he’s comfortable six months of the year.

1 Comment

  1. Dimsdale on December 23, 2009 at 6:34 pm

    Nice of Holder and Obama to give these guys a little vacation.  I wonder if they gave them some spendin' money too?  Maybe a hug or a kiss.  Or a bow?



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