It's too early, to be sure, to judge the Obama Administration's policies. We know that he is "reversing" Bush Administration policies on Gitmo, but we have no clue as to what direction that car is now heading. The announcement that Gitmo will close is part of the made for TV package. Change we cannot be at all clear about.
Obama is playing to the New York Times and the LA Times here. These organs of enlightened if financially insolvent opinion are quite clear that Bush's military tribunals are kangaroo courts. Presumably they want all the Guantanamo detainees turned over to civilian courts. Okay. But doesn't that mean that a lot of these detainees, captured by the military, will be released? And what does that mean? Well, we have an idea. The New York Times delivers it:
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 President Obama signed Thursday 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 United States 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.
His status was announced in an Internet statement by the militant group and was confirmed by an American counterterrorism official.
So in this case, those terrible, constitutionally corrosive Bushies were too nice. They released al-Shihri to the Yemenis, who apparently put him in a terrorist twelve-step program. He relapsed. Now you can chalk this up to Bush incompetence, but doesn't his release indicate that we didn't have enough on him to be certain that he was the real bad guy that he obviously was?
So what about those recovering terrorists whom we are pretty sure aren't recovering? Aren't some of these folks going to be released by American courts, if the Courts get a hold of them? Courts aren't really designed to safeguard national security. And what if the next great terrorist attack on the mainland is accomplished by someone who got out with a writ of habeas corpus? What is that going to do to our concern for civil liberties?
You might suppose that the NY and LA Times would be thinking about this. If so, they are keeping their thoughts to themselves. I am guessing that Obama is thinking about it. The last thing he wants is to be responsible for the release of the next bin Laden. I am guessing that he will figure out a way to keep the really bad eggs from shipping out. But he is going to have to do it on his own. The Left has nothing.
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