Gitmo Terrorists Hould Check In, Not Check Out

 

IBDEditorials.com

War On Terror: Osama bin Laden's bodyguard may soon exit Guantanamo Bay, along with dozens of others. Bad idea. To keep the U.S. homeland safe, dangerous terrorists should check into Gitmo — not check out.

The American left has been squawking for years about the detention facility for captured terrorists set up after the 9/11 attacks, on U.S. territory at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, arguably the most comfortable POW camp in the history of warfare.

Why is there a detention facility for captured terrorists at Guantanamo Bay? Many of the terrorists captured after 9/11 "were clearly cold-blooded killers who had committed horrific acts of savagery and welcomed a fight to the death," former Vice President Dick Cheney explained in his memoir "In My Time."

"We needed to find a secure place to hold them away from the field of battle," and away from access to U.S. courts, Cheney recalled. (The now-retired David Souter and his fellow Supreme Court liberals ended up extending that access to Gitmo's terrorists anyway.)

As president, Obama found Gitmo came in handy, and reneged on closing it. The recent news that U.S. intelligence believes a 53-year-old Gitmo alumnus named Sufyan Ben Qumu, a leader of Libya's Ansar al-Sharia militia, helped organize the recent killing of Ambassador Chris Stevens is a reminder of the facility's importance.

The 55 detainees getting Get Out of Gitmo Free cards include Idris Ahmad Abdu Qadir Idris, a bodyguard for the late al-Qaida terrorist chief Osama bin Laden.

"There are numerous examples of jihadist prisoners, from Gitmo and other prisons, returning to terrorism," Dennis Pluchinsky, adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Center for Security Studies and author of a 2007 study on global jihadist recidivism, told IBD .

While there is no study of overall recidivism rates of jihadists worldwide, the U.S. government pegs the Guantanamo Bay rate at about 27%. So Obama's planned release "means that a quarter of them will return to violence," Pluchinsky warns. "Given that most are Yemeni and returning to Yemen, I would add another 8%."

Obama's release list features Taliban operatives Noorullah Noori, Abdul Haq Wasiq, Khairullah Khairkhwa and Mullah Mohammed Fazl, suspected of killing thousands of Shiites in Afghanistan before 9/11.

The White House says the worst won't be let go. Good luck finding "good guys" among this bunch of captured terrorists.