Thursday, January 22, 2009

GITMO

Word is spreading that President Barack Obama is issuing an executive order that will immediately suspend the military commission system at GITMO and shut down the entire camp within a year. OK. But wait a minute!
As a candidate, President Obama promised to continue to track down, capture, or kill terrorists around the world. Unless he plans to kill all of them, this will necessarily entail holding additional detainees that will never be near GITMO. The real questions the Obama administration must answer are:
When the U.S. captures a high value terrorist, where will he/she be detained?
Under what legal framework will he/she be detained?
How will all this work given the shifting legal landscape since 9/11?

UPDATE:

The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year.

The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program (Yeah, right!) for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.

His status was announced in an Internet statement by the militant group and was confirmed by an American counterterrorism official.

“They’re one and the same guy,” said the official, who insisted on anonymity because he was discussing an intelligence analysis. “He returned to Saudi Arabia in 2007, but his movements to Yemen remain unclear.” (I'm shocked!!!)

Almost half the camp’s remaining detainees are Yemenis, and efforts to repatriate them depend in part on the creation of a Yemeni rehabilitation program — partly financed by the United States — similar to the Saudi one. Saudi Arabia has claimed that no graduate of its program has returned to terrorism.

“The lesson here is, whoever receives former Guantánamo detainees needs to keep a close eye on them,” the American official said.

No, the lessons will be learned when one of these guys kills a bunch of Americans......AGAIN!


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