The Turkish government arrested two dozen Al Qaeda operatives Jan. 22, including Ibrahim Sen, who was released from the Theater Internment Facility at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay.
Sen checked into Gitmo in 2006 and he was released to the Turks in 2008, who, apparently let him go—until the Monday sweep of a Muslim charity called the Humanitarian Aid Foundation. The charity is dedicated to supporting Syrian victims of that country’s civil war.
Whether or not the charity was an Al Qaeda front or not, the arrest of Sen brings up again the problem of the federal government, in this case the George W. Bush administration, releasing dangerous men from their detainment.
In his 2008 campaign for the White House, President Barack Obama promised to close the internment center at Gitmo and he famously signed the executive order to close it in a year on his first day in office.
Conservatives have attacked the president in two ways for having the center still open. First, there is the obvious failure of leadership and will to follow through with his promise. Second, there is the obvious hypocrisy of a man, who got caught up when the reality of the real world caught up with Obama’s cheap shot campaign rhetoric.
But, instead of descending into cheap shot rhetoric themselves, conservatives should consider what is really going on—and explain it to the American people, who have no idea if they depend on the mainstream media.
The original Obama plan was to purchase from the state of Illinois the Thomson Correction Center, a super-maximum security prison built in 2001, and move the detainees at Gitmo there.
This was more than a classic pork for the home state play. Before you ask what would happen to the current inmates, you should know that although the state built the prison for $200 million, it never actually opened for the prison for business.
Only under the reign of Obama, could the detainees be caught between one detention that never closed and a prison that never opened.
Over the objections of House Republicans, specifically, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), a member of that chamber’s appropriations committee, just before the 2012 election, Obama purchased Thompson for $165 million and committed to refurbishing and staffing the facility as a Pentagon-run prison.
In the end, it could be that Obama always intended to close Gitmo, not to end the detention of irregular combatants, but to take a huge barbed-wire white elephant off of Illinois’ books.
Regardless, the practice of releasing detainees continues—and they keep popping up as active terrorists in Israel, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Syria and now Turkey.
The biggest problem with holding these detainees is that while they are dangerous, many are in fact innocent.
Call it the “fog of war,” or just another sad chapter in the Global War on Terror, but many of the detainees held at Gitmo are the victims of false accusations, fueled by tribal vendetta or a bounty. Some of the innocents were part of area sweeps and were never properly processed or adjudicated.
Once detained, be it at Gitmo or Camp Bucca, Iraq or the TIF at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, the innocent man interacts with the hardcore terrorists and however reluctantly finds common cause with his fellow inmates against the guards and the United States.
What are we supposed to do? Our very detention created a terrorist finishing school for men with clean records and yet every intention of harming Americans and America as soon as they exit with $50 and a new suit.
In the real world, the security trumps civil rights, so innocent or not, these guys cannot just be released into the wild. It is a tough thing to say and do. But, the government has trouble reforming shop lifters, how can we expect some counselor to turn away tomorrow’s terror threat?
This brutal policy is easier to execute as long as Gitmo remains, absurdly, on foreign soil. Once the detainees are transferred by Obama to Thompson, their legal standing get the upgrade to Super Size.
Fear not. In the conflict between security and civil rights, Obama may be sincerely torn, but considerations of pork conquer all others. Frankly speaking, the one thing the president and the Democrats do not want is an empty prison—they need to pack that thing up and start hitting racking up the spending.
But, hey, it would not be the first time a Muslim terrorist was frustrated by pork.
Neil W. McCabe——
Bio and Archives
Neil W. McCabe is the editor of Human Event’s “Guns & Patriots” e-letter and was a senior reporter at the Human Events newspaper. McCabe deployed with the Army Reserve to Iraq for 15 months as a combat historian. For many years, he was a reporter and photographer for “The Pilot,” Boston’s Catholic paper. He was also the editor of two free community papers, “The Somerville (Mass.) News and “The Alewife (North Cambridge, Mass.).”
