Close Guantanamo, Release Terrorists For 'Rehabilitation,' Reap Consequences (UPDATED)

Did you think President Bush was keeping these guys in Gitmo for fun?

Maybe to jab Democrats in the eye?

Just because he could?

Rehabbed terrorist continues being terrorist, bombs Americans.

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 that President Barack Obama signed 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 U.S. Embassy in Yemen's capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.

The lesson, as always: These guys aren't plain old criminals.

You can't treat them as such.

25 January 12:08am BST: And they come out of rehabilitation angrier and more determined than ever to be terrorists, rather than peace-loving, productive, members of society.

Two men released from the US "war on terror" prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have appeared in a video posted on a jihadist website, the SITE monitoring service reported.

One of the two former inmates, a Saudi man identified as Abu Sufyan al-Azdi al-Shahri, or prisoner number 372, has been elevated to the senior ranks of Al-Qaeda in Yemen, a US counter-terrorism official told AFP.

Three other men appear in the video, including Abu al-Hareth Muhammad al-Oufi, identified as an Al-Qaeda field commander. SITE later said he was prisoner No. 333.

Honestly, I don't think Obama really intends to close Gitmo--that is to say, shut down the Bush administration's "enemy combatants" designation and treat these guys as regular criminals.

I don't think he's dumb enough to just ship them off to Jack Murtha's local minimum security prison. So far, what he's said and done (nothing, yet) on that front has been done to placate the angry lefties.


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