Scores of prisoners released from Guantanamo Bay by Barack Obama have
either gone missing or have been identified as likely to return to a
life of terror, according to the very liberal-leaning New York Times.
U.S. military officials say several of their detainees released by
Barack Obama could now be threats against America.
When Obama first took office, there were 242 inmates at Gitmo. When he
left, there were 41.
And some of those have actually gone missing in Syria, setting
America’s intelligence and military sectors on nervous notice.
An estimated 150 former Guantánamo Bay prisoners liberated as part of
former President Barack Obama’s efforts to shut down the U.S. military
detention center “risk being killed—or could end up becoming threats
themselves,” the New York Times (NYT) acknowledged this week. …
The
previous administration reportedly convinced about three dozen nations
to take in 150 “lower-risk” prisoners from dangerous countries like
Yemen and Libya.
Senegal, one of the countries who took in some of the prisoners, already deported two of them back to “their chaotic birth country of Libya,” where they “vanished” once they “fell into the hands of a hard-line militia leader who has been accused of prisoner abuse,” the Times reveals.
According to the United Nations, hundreds of African migrants are being bought and auctioned off at “slave markets” in Libya.
The move by Senegal has prompted fears that other countries who took in Gitmo detainees may also begin repatriating them back to their dangerous home countries where they may return to jihadi activities.
NYT
attempts to blame what it described as the “collapse” of the Gitmo
prisoner resettlement system employed by the Obama and Bush
administrations on U.S. President Donald Trump, who has refused to
free any detainees, reporting:
[A] decision this month by Senegal to deport two former detainees to
their chaotic birth country of Libya has raised the prospect that the
resettlement system is starting to collapse under President Trump.
…
The case sets a worrisome precedent, current and former officials
said. The danger, they say, is that other countries may follow Senegal
in forcibly moving more of the nearly 150 Obama-era resettled former
detainees home to unstable places where they risk being killed—or
could end up becoming threats themselves.
…
The breakdown of the Senegal resettlement also appears to be at least
partly a consequence of the disorganization that has afflicted the
State Department since Mr. Trump took office. The Obama administration
set up a high-level, centralized office charged with monitoring former
detainees indefinitely and dealing with any problems. But Rex W.
Tillerson, Mr. Trump’s first secretary of state, shuttered it, so that
function was added to the long list of things individual embassies are
supposed to track.
Former
President George W. Bush liberated even more prisoners (532) than his
successor.
Gitmo still holds 41 detainees, including many Yemenis, and 26 who
have been deemed “forever prisoners,” or too dangerous to release.
The Trump administration has indicated that it will make decisions on whether to release Gitmo detainees “on a case-by-case basis,” but has yet to liberate any.
Nearly three out of every ten released Gitmo detainees are suspected or confirmed of having re-engaged in terrorist activities, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) reports.
In his
quest to shut down Gitmo, Obama met bipartisan opposition in Congress,
particularly to a primary tenet of the Democratic president’s proposal
to close the military detention center—transferring captives onto U.S.
soil.
Obama himself signed the legislation into law that prohibits the
United States government from transferring prisoners to the United
States.
Article posted with permission from Pamela Geller