Ex-Gitmo detainee reportedly gets al-Qaida role

[MrFun]

Hey Slowwy, congratulations on being so honest by posting that you have failed with your argument.

[Naked Gents Rut]

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. ...

The Defense Department has said as many as 61 former Guantanamo detainees -- about 11 percent of 520 detainees transferred from the detention center and released -- are believed to have returned to the fight.

The latest case highlights the risk the new US administration faces as it moves to empty Guantanamo of its remaining 245 prisoners and close the controversial detention camp within a year.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hZfIcWnHqBz4kQR90lC_pXaHeW4Q

[Naked Gents Rut]

Man, this is making my head hurt. Let me see if I've got this straight:

1) The Bush Administration grabs some guy they think is a terrorist
2) They send him to Gitmo and get all Jack Bauer on his ass
3) Oops! They were wrong!
4) Having turned this guy into a ticking time-bomb of anti-Americanism, they release him into the wild
5) Surprise! Now he's a terrorist!

Ok, that part I think I follow.

Christ, how ****ing naive and stupid can you people be? In the man's own words...

"By Allah, imprisonment only increased our persistence in our principles for which we went out, did jihad for, and were imprisoned for," al-Shihri was quoted as saying.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hZfIcWnHqBz4kQR90lC_pXaHeW4Q

Yeah, it really sounds like he was an innocent before he got sent to Gitmo.

[DaShi]

All you do is run your mouth. Put up, in some manner, or STFU, DaShi.

So you're saying that you have no arguement? Keep hiding, the world will never be safe enough for you.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Man, this is making my head hurt. Let me see if I've got this straight:

1) The Bush Administration grabs some guy they think is a terrorist
2) They send him to Gitmo and get all Jack Bauer on his ass
3) Oops! They were wrong!
4) Having turned this guy into a ticking time-bomb of anti-Americanism, they release him into the wild
5) Surprise! Now he's a terrorist!

Ok, that part I think I follow.

Christ, how ****ing naive and stupid can you people be? In the man's own words...

"By Allah, imprisonment only increased our persistence in our principles for which we went out, did jihad for, and were imprisoned for," al-Shihri was quoted as saying.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hZfIcWnHqBz4kQR90lC_pXaHeW4Q

Yeah, it really sounds like he was an innocent before he got sent to Gitmo.

Let's leave aside the obvious: that this guy is boosting his street cred by misrepresenting his pre-Gitmo commitment to Al-Qaeda and jihad. Let's assume he really always was a terrorist.

OK, so why did the Bush Administration release him? And don't say "public opinion" or "world opinion" or any other bull along those lines. When it came to the war on terror, the Bushies didn't follow public opinion on anything. There are all matter of scum still locked in Gitmo; why is this scum out?

[SlowwHand]

Classic "damned if you do, damned if you don't", Rufus. Par for your course.

DaShi, I'm asking you to make a bet, but you keep evading. Just say no, that you just like to talk.
We'll leave it at that and forget it. Your accusations are consistently wrong, as any reasonable person can see.

[Naked Gents Rut]

There are all matter of scum still locked in Gitmo; why is this scum out?

Because the Saudis were willing to take him. Most of the scum still in Gitmo are the scum that no one else will take off our hands.

[SlowwHand]

There are all matter of scum still locked in Gitmo; why is this scum out?

Because the Saudis were willing to take him. Most of the scum still in Gitmo are the scum that no one else will take off our hands.

Exactly. Close Gitmo, but don't release or send anywhere. Alrighty then.

[DaShi]

Classic "damned if you do, damned if you don't", Rufus. Par for your course.

This is running your mouth. btw Are are you really too stupid to know the difference.

DaShi, I'm asking you to make a bet, but you keep evading. Just say no, that you just like to talk.
We'll leave it at that and forget it. Your accusations are consistently wrong, as any reasonable person can see.

Actually, my accusations are based on what you actually do on this forum. You complain about me running my mouth, when I'm actually on topic. This is your thread and all you've done is whine and cry in it. And you're obsession with hiding behind a bet (hell, you even offered pm's to hide in), is the behavior of a coward with a weak argument. Either put up some facts or STFU. You can't buy your way out of this, pansy boy.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Exactly. Close Gitmo, but don't release or send anywhere. Alrighty then.

No. Close Gitmo, lock these guys down in any number of other facilities we have for such a purpose. Treat them like any other high-threat prisoners (and, in truth, once imprisoned they are far less of a threat than your average American murderer). Let Amnesty International visit if they want. They try them in accordance with established law and international protocols. then, if they're found guilty, execute them.

Is that really so hard to understand?

But meanwhile, you might explain why the actions taken by Bush while Gitmo was up and running reflect in any way on Obama or his plan to close Gitmo and put the prisoners in other maximum security prisons. Or just explain why putting these guys in Gitmo is a good idea, but putting them in Leavenworth is a bad one.

(Incidentally, the answer to the converse of that question -- if putting them in Leavenworth is a good idea, why not leave them in Gitmo? -- is that Gitmo has become a public diplomacy disaster, and we gain far more from closing it and moving the prisoners elsewhere than we do from leaving it open. For that, too, you can thank the same guys who let Abu Sufyan al-Azdi al-Shahri out in the first place.)

[Darius871]

Man, this is making my head hurt. Let me see if I've got this straight:

1) The Bush Administration grabs some guy they think is a terrorist
2) They send him to Gitmo and get all Jack Bauer on his ass
3) Oops! They were wrong!
4) Having turned this guy into a ticking time-bomb of anti-Americanism, they release him into the wild
5) Surprise! Now he's a terrorist!

Ok, that part I think I follow.

#3's a little strong; there's a difference between being "wrong" and "having insufficient evidence for post-Boumediene conviction" I can turn my ex-wife and her boyfriend into pez dispensers and still get acquitted, but that doesn't make the prosecutor wrong.

It's one thing to assume innocence until proof of guilt for procedural purposes, but it's quite another to be so certain he started off Joe Schlub and was made a terrorist with such a limited factual basis and his own public statements to the contrary. It's only likely.

Let's leave aside the obvious: that this guy is boosting his street cred by misrepresenting his pre-Gitmo commitment to Al-Qaeda and jihad. Let's assume he really always was a terrorist.

OK, so why did the Bush Administration release him? And don't say "public opinion" or "world opinion" or any other bull along those lines. When it came to the war on terror, the Bushies didn't follow public opinion on anything. There are all matter of scum still locked in Gitmo; why is this scum out?

Because the SCOTUS in Boumediene rightly guaranteed habaeus corpus for non-citizen detainees and struck down the MCA's substitutes for habaeus corpus in the process, which makes me wonder why you assume the administration somehow could have held al-Shihri indefinitely even if they wanted to. You're right that they ignored public opinion (at least in the second term), but I don't recall them ever pulling a Jackson and telling the SCOTUS to shove it.

The evidence with respect to al-Shahri was probably just insufficient to answer a habeus corpus petition (regardless of whether al-Shihri in fact filed one or not), which proves nothing one way or the other about what he was actually up to prior to detention. If you have additional information illuminating that time period, I'm all ears.

[GePap]

The whole gitmo idea was **** from the start. These guys should have been handled like the criminals they are. If we really believed them as being without any rights, we should have just shot them when captured. Sadly the Bush people were only sane enough to recognize the wrongness of that, but not sane enough to stick to a system that worked already.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

#3's a little strong; there's a difference between being "wrong" and "having insufficient evidence for post-Boumediene conviction" I can turn my ex-wife and her boyfriend into pez dispensers and still get acquitted, but that doesn't make the prosecutor wrong.

Agreed; it was internet-forum hyperbole, but it hardly matters given my real point, which I'll get to in a moment.

Because the SCOTUS in Boumediene rightly guaranteed habaeus corpus for non-citizen detainees and struck down the MCA's substitutes for habaeus corpus in the process, which makes me wonder why you assume the administration somehow could have held al-Shihri indefinitely even if they wanted to. You're right that they ignored public opinion (at least in the second term), but I don't recall them ever pulling a Jackson and telling the SCOTUS to shove it.

The evidence with respect to al-Shahri was probably just insufficient to answer a habeus corpus petition (regardless of whether al-Shihri in fact filed one or not), which proves nothing one way or the other about what he was actually up to prior to detention. If you have additional information illuminating that time period, I'm all ears.

See, here's the point -- and I think we agree on this. Closing Gitmo has nothing to do with whether prisoners are going to be set free, which seems to be Slowwy's concern. Regardless of whether Gitmo closes, prisoners who can't be held there, thanks to Boumediene, have to be set free regardless. Prisoners who can still be held there can also be held elsewhere. The closing of Gitmo is irrelevant from a US security standpoint, but a huge win from a public diplomacy standpoint, which is why closing it is a no-brainer.

As for al-Shahri, he's just another aspect of the Bushies' monumental f*ck-up of the War on Terror; if they'd used foresight instead of arrogance and a titanic sense of their own righteousness (or maybe if they'd just employed more real lawyers and fewer graduates of Holy Blood of Christ Law School and Grill), they could and should have predicted the strong possibility that the Court wasn't going to uphold indefinite detention, and they could have avoided handing Al-Qaeda a public relations coup.

But, as I said, whatever happened with al-Shahri -- who I'm sure is an evil-hearted little sh!t, regardless of what he did -- has got f*ck-all to do with Obama and with closing Gitmo.

[tinyp3nis]

Man, this is making my head hurt. Let me see if I've got this straight:

1) The Bush Administration grabs some guy they think is a terrorist
2) They send him to Gitmo and get all Jack Bauer on his ass
3) Oops! They were wrong!
4) Having turned this guy into a ticking time-bomb of anti-Americanism, they release him into the wild
5) Surprise! Now he's a terrorist!

Ok, that part I think I follow.

Christ, how ****ing naive and stupid can you people be? In the man's own words...

"By Allah, imprisonment only increased our persistence in our principles for which we went out, did jihad for, and were imprisoned for," al-Shihri was quoted as saying.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hZfIcWnHqBz4kQR90lC_pXaHeW4Q

Yeah, it really sounds like he was an innocent before he got sent to Gitmo.

Jihad doesn't mean what you think it means. It's a broad term and can mean other things than terror and war, his jihad then might have been on a different level. For example he could be saying he feels he got inprisoned because of his views or whatever.

[Naked Gents Rut]

These guys should have been handled like the criminals they are.

A large proportion of the enemy combatants held in Gitmo never committed a crime. They were in Afghanistan (or elsewhere) fighting for the Taliban or Al Qaeda, but had never committed a terrorist act against the United States. You can't handle them like criminals because they aren't criminals; they're soldiers for an enemy of the United States.

Boumediene rightly guaranteed habaeus corpus for non-citizen detainees

No habeas rights for non-citizens.