Yemen human rights activist and blogger Jane Novak has reported for years on how Yemeni intelligence and military officials have facilitated al-Qaida training camps -- often providing "safe houses, training and passports to the jihadists that travel to Iraq to attempt to kill U.S. troops."
The Yemeni government, Novak points out, has also used al-Qaida mercenaries to fight northern rebels and train tribal militias. Jihad spiritual advisor Anwar al-Awlaki, linked to the Sept. 11 hijackers and Fort Hood mass killer Hasan, also calls Yemen home -- and reportedly blessed the Crotch Bomber attack, according to The Washington Times.
Now, the Yemen government has the gall to blame the West for not providing enough assistance to stop the breeding of hundreds of future flying Crotch Bombers.
America, unfortunately, is hardly in a position to criticize Yemen's jihadi revolving door. ABC News reported this week that two of the four jihadi leaders behind the Christmas Day terror plot were released from Gitmo during the Bush administration in November 2007. (What a quandary for Bush-bashers who have stubbornly denied that Gitmo recidivism threatens our national security.) The freed detainees were shipped off to terror-friendly Saudi Arabia, where they underwent "art therapy rehabilitation" -- the ultimate bloody brainchild of the jihadi-as-victim mindset.
In January 2009, the two "rehabilitated" recidivists released a video vowing to wage jihad to "aid the religion," "establish the rightly guided caliphate" and " fight against our enemies." One of the duo, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States embassy in Yemen's capital, Sana, in September 2008.
Another Yemeni at Gitmo, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, was convicted by a U.S. military tribunal in the last days of the Bush administration for conspiring with al-Qaida, soliciting murder and providing material support for terrorism. He had scripted the videotaped wills of two Sept. 11 hijackers and boasted of making a two-hour al-Qaida commercial designed to recruit suicide bombers, according to FBI testimony. The recruitment ad celebrated the U.S.S. Cole bombers in Yemen.
Hundreds of Yemeni detainees at Gitmo abandoned the benefit of the doubt years ago. Yet, Attorney General Eric Holder's law firm, Covington and Burling, has provided dozens of them pro bono legal representation and sob-story media relations campaigns. True to form, former Covington and Burling lawyer Marc Falkoff dedicated a book of Gitmo detainee poetry to his Yemeni suspected terrorist "friends inside the wire." And the White House is rolling out the red carpet to bring them to U.S. soil for civilian trials.
At a time when we should be disabling the jihadi revolving door, its rotating shaft is spinning out of control.