On a tip from Ed Kilbane
Video 187
To top this off he’s suddenly concerned amount the cost of keeping Gitmo open. Wasn’t he the one who gave them all computers and a $750,000 soccer field? This coming from the guy who will double the national debt by the time he leaves office.
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Let's begin with the conclusion: Barack Obama is releasing dangerous terrorists against the recommendations of military and intelligence professionals, he's doing so at a time when the threat level from radical Islamists is elevated, and he is lying about it. He is lying about how many jihadists he has released and lying about their backgrounds, all part of his effort to empty the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay.
We write this knowing the accusation is a strong one and that the word lying will offend the sensibilities of the establishment media. There is an unwritten rule that requires euphemizing lies with gentler descriptions, especially when talking about the president of the United States. There is a veritable thesaurus of verbal politeness one can deploy: deceiving, dissembling, misleading, prevaricating, being duplicitous, evasive, fallacious, mendacious, dishonest, disingenuous, specious, spurious, untruthful.
Not this time. The president is lying.
The facts: Ibrahim al Qosi was a senior al Qaeda operative and a close associate of Osama bin Laden. An 11-page classified assessment of Qosi from U.S. military and intelligence professionals on Joint Task Force Guantánamo was made public by WikiLeaks. From that assessment: "Detainee is an admitted al Qaeda operative and one of Usama bin Laden's (UBL) most trusted associates and veteran bodyguard." And: "Following a 1994 assassination attempt against UBL, UBL chose detainee to be one of approximately ten individuals assigned to his protection detail." And: "Detainee has been very forthright regarding his commitment to UBL and al Qaeda. He explains his commitment to UBL as a religious duty to defend Islam and fulfill his obligation to jihad." The assessment concluded: "Detainee is assessed to be a HIGH risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests, and allies."
Barack Obama approved Qosi's transfer to Sudan in July 2012.
Earlier this month, Qosi resurfaced as a leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, appearing in a propaganda video for the group, which administration and intelligence officials have consistently identified as a direct threat to the United States. He joins a growing list of terrorists once held in American detention facilities and now leading the global jihadist movement and plotting attacks against the United States—a list that includes Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS.
In an interview broadcast December 14, Olivier Knox, chief Washington correspondent for Yahoo News, asked Obama about Qosi and Guantánamo.
Obama reiterated his call to close Guantánamo and repeated his disputed claim that jihadists use Guantánamo as a major recruiting tool.
Then he lied:
"Keep in mind that between myself and the Bush administration hundreds of people have been released and the recidivism rate—we anticipate," Obama said. "We assume that there are going to be—out of four, five, six hundred people that get released—a handful of them are going to be embittered and still engaging in anti-U.S. activities and trying to link up potentially with their old organizations."
A total of 653 detainees have been released. Of those, 196 are confirmed (117) or suspected (79) of returning to jihadist activity. That's not a "handful." It's almost a third. The president knows this. The numbers come from the man he chose as the nation's top intelligence official, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence. Military and intelligence officials who study the global jihadist movement tell The Weekly Standard that Clapper's assessment undoubtedly understates the recidivism rate, given the uneven commitment to tracking former jihadists by host countries and the lag times between release and reintegration.
The president continued. And he lied again:
"The bottom line is that the strategic gains we make by closing Guantánamo will outweigh, you know, those low-level individuals who, you know, have been released so far."
There's scant evidence to support the president's assertion about "strategic gains" associated with the closure of Guantánamo. But it's a speculative claim, impossible to disprove. That's not true of his claim that those released from Guantánamo "so far" have been "low-level individuals."
That's demonstrably false.
President Obama himself approved the exchange of the so-called Taliban Five, all senior leaders, for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. Not one member of the Taliban Five can be considered "low-level." Indeed, all five were senior Taliban commanders judged "high risks" to the United States and its allies by Joint Task Force Guantánamo. All five worked with al Qaeda prior to the 9/11 attacks. U.S. intelligence officials suspect that one or more of them has already reconnected with jihadist brethren and may be assisting the Taliban's fight. When U.S. intelligence officials asked a foreign intelligence service, likely the Saudis, to rank more than 100 detainees by threat level, Youssef Mohammed al Shihri, transferred in 2007, ranked fourth. Other released detainees fought alongside Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, played senior roles in al Qaeda's financial front groups, and led al Qaeda affiliates. And, of course, the Guantánamo recidivist who prompted the question, Ibrahim al Qosi, was "one of Usama bin Laden's closest associates."
Obama has also downplayed the threats from Guantánamo releasees in other ways. He describes the detainees as "embittered," as if the hatred that inspires them grows from their time in Guantánamo rather than their devotion to a murderous cause. Instead of rejoining the war, the recidivists are merely "trying to link up with their old organizations." Perhaps most bizarre is his description of the process he's using to determine which detainees can be transferred or set free. "The judgment that we're continually making is: Are there individuals who are significantly more dangerous than the people who are already out there who are fighting? What do they add? Do they have special skills? Do they have special knowledge that ends up making a significant threat to the United States?"
Those are the criteria? Detainees can be released if the White House determines that they are no more dangerous than, say, the leaders of ISIS, AQAP, Boko Haram, Jabhat al Nusra, the Haqqani network, the Khorasan group? If this is actually the way the administration evaluates potential releases, it would explain why so many veteran jihadists have been freed. It's a process that prioritizes emptying the facility over the security of the country.
Obama's comments on Guantánamo come in the middle of a concerted White House public relations campaign to convince the American people that the president is redoubling efforts to abate the threat from radical Islam (which the administration persists in calling "violent extremism"). In the space of two weeks, Obama delivered an Oval Office address on ISIS, traveled to the Pentagon for a meeting and photo-op on the military campaign in Iraq and Syria, and paid a visit to the National Counterterrorism Center for a briefing and remarks to reporters. The president didn't announce any significant changes to his strategy. But with his approval on handling terrorism at just 34 percent, the lowest level of his presidency, Obama has been eager to demonstrate he's paying attention to the issue.
It's a political solution to a national security problem. And the entire exercise has been revealed as a fraud by the president's dishonesty on Guantánamo, which conceals a policy that will increase the very threats he'd have us believe he's now taking seriously.
We would think all of this might be newsworthy: The president of the United States is releasing dangerous terrorists, and he's lying about it. And yet none of the country's leading newspapers or broadcast networks has reported Obama's comments. If you get your news exclusively from the New York Times and the Washington Post, or from ABC, CBS, and NBC, you have no idea what the president said about Guantánamo. And you certainly don't know what he said was untrue.
Not a peep from the legion of self-styled fact-checkers, either. PolitiFact scrutinizes seemingly every guttural noise that emanates from Donald Trump but cannot find the time to assess specious claims from the president on the most pressing issue of the day.
So the president believes, not unreasonably, that he can stack lie upon lie with impunity. Workplace violence. Isolated extremist. One-off attack. Decimated. On the run. Jayvee. Contained. And on it goes.
Three days after Obama's interview with Yahoo, the New York Times published an article on Guantánamo. The top of the article broke news: The administration is planning to accelerate the pace of detainee transfers, with as many as 17 coming before the end of January. The rest of the piece amounted to a long complaint about the lack of media access to the facility and those who run it. And what about Obama's lies?
Not a single word.
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