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.
We have no idea how much this guy was tortured in our custody. But he most likely was. Even if he wasn’t, he was held without rights, a trial, or any protections of the Geneva conventions for years. If he wasn’t a terrorist before he went in, he sure came out one. If I had the same thing done to me by the US government, I would be tempted to go join a terrorist organization when I got out. Our rampant disregard for the law has brought us into this situation.
I don’t think there’s much we can do to prevent these guys from going out and becoming terrorists, regardless of their status before we captured them. We’ve even killed people in custody, accidentally. Why shouldn’t these men be righteously passed out. We (the U.S. government) won’t even apologize for ACCIDENTALLY KIDNAPPING AND TORTURING A CANADIAN CITIZEN. Why should they do anything other than try to fight against us? What else makes sense? If American citizens were captured, tortured, held for years by al Qaeda and then released, when they joined the army and got on TV and said they were gonna go fight and hopefully kill the enemy leader, we would have coast-to-coast fucking parades for them.
So it makes sense that the same would happen on the opposite side of the coin.