By: Wilmot Proviso
President Barack Obama’s Guantanamo Bay clearance sale has been a national disgrace. Everything must go, according to the president — no matter what crime the terrorist being detained there was accused of committing.
Kirk Lippold knows the pain more than most. A retired commander in the U.S. Navy, he was the man in charge of the U.S.S. Cole when it was bombed on Oct. 12, 2000. Seventeen of the men in his charge were lost in the Al Qaeda-linked attack.
Mashur Abdallah Ahmed al Sabri was one of the men authorities believe helped commit the sick attack. He was in American hands, detained at Guantanamo Bay.
The operative word, however, is was: al Sabri was transferred to Saudi Arabia on May 16 by the Obama administration. According to Fox News, he will participate in a Saudi “rehabilitation” program, which will apparently cure him of his jihadi tendencies. Right.
Lippold, needles to say, was furious.
The U.S.S. Cole being towed after the Oct. 2000 attack
“I would have liked to have seen him receive a military commission where he was tried, convicted and sentenced and then his suitability for release determined under the laws of armed conflict,” Lippold said. “From the perspective of the American people and my crew, he’s never been held accountable.”
The attack occurred in the port of Aden, Yemen, and was one of the first times that Al Qaeda showed up on American radar.
A September 2008 report by the Department of Defense linked al Sabri to the bombing and said that he was “high risk” and “likely to pose a threat to the U.S., its interests and allies.”
“Detainee was a member of an Yemeni Al Qaeda cell which was directly involved with the USS COLE attack. Detainee attended advanced training in Afghanistan after recruitment by a known Al Qaeda facilitator,” the report said.
However, that language predictably softened under the Obama administration. It called him an Al Qaeda “associate” and said he “probably did not play a significant role in terrorist operations.”
Obama’s administration altering reports so that it could fulfill part of its agenda? Perish the thought.
“The only thing that could have changed is someone’s perception that al Sabri or someone like him mellowed — that they don’t pose much of a threat anymore,” said Paul Rester, the former head of interrogations at Guantanamo.
If al Sabri were to go back to the battlefield, he’d be far from the first person released from Gitmo to return to his old terrorist ways. But that’s the price for Obama’s agenda-setting clearance sale — justice denied and barbaric killers set free.
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