Three years ago, Adbullah Saleh al-Ajmi was safely locked away at Guantanamo Bay.
Two weeks ago, he blew himself up in Iraq, brutally murdering seven people.
How did he get out of his prison cell at Gitmo? Easy. His U.S.-based lawyers walked him out the front door!
That despite strong arguments from U.S. counterterrorism analysts arguing that al-Ajmi should under no circumstances be freed since...
-He deserted from the Kuwaiti army to participate in jihad in Afghanistan
-The Taliban supplied him with arms, including grenades
-He admitted fighting with the Taliban, including engaging in two or three firefights
-He was captured by coalition forces in the Tora Bora region, an area thought to be a hideout of Osama bin Laden
-Upon his arrival at Gitmo, he demonstrated "aggressive" behavior
-And based on a review of classified and unclassified documents, al-Ajmi was declared a threat to the U.S. and its allies.
But after Al-Ajmi's lawyers denied all the charges, the U.S. government folded and sent him back home to Kuwait.
Of course, now his family refers to him as "The Martyr Abdullah".
Nevertheless, the international community is clamoring for us to close down Gitmo, Senators Obama, Clinton and McCain are all desperate for us to close Gitmo, and even President Bush wants to see Gitmo closed.
And it looks like they're going to get their wish. Just this week, the U.S. released three MORE Guantanamo detainees, including Sami al-Haj, a suspected courier for Al Qaeda.
Terrifying? Oh yes. Surprising? Sadly, no.
2 comments:
Okay. Let's see who are making the mistakes. The USA military released this guy. It is their mistake.
To be sure the guy's defense lawyers said that he was innocent. ALL defense lawyers say that; it is their job. If our military believes the defense lawyers, that just shows how stupid they can be.
Just about as stupid as holding people with the same last names as terrorists or some guy that the police in Pakistan tell us may be a terrorist.
AND, here's the cap on the story. The guy is said to be a deserter from the Kuwait army, but we didn't return him to Kuwait, where he would presumably be put in a military prison for years.
In other words, both the mistaken releases and the mistaken arrests just go to show how stupid the arrests at Guantanamo have been. Maybe two in three of those arrested were never terrorists, and maybe as many as one in ten of those released turns out to be a terrorist (some undoubtedly because they have become terrorists in Guantanamo).
Thanks for your comment.
I think the point of all this is that US courts should not be involved with anything involving POWs or enemy combatants.
I agree about the Kuwaiti soldier. I am wondering the same thing about his repatriation. If I was to guess I'd say that the court was told to release him unconditionally to wherever he wanted to go since it was ruled he was being held mistakenly. I'm sure his first choice was not Kuwait.
We can argue all day about whether we should be holding any prisoners at all at Gitmo. But wherever they are held they should keep prisoner according to military law, not civilian law.
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