Just a quick postscript on those 15 hardened jihadis our president saw fit to transfer out of the Guantanamo Bay enemy combatant detention facility this week. They have been sent to the United Arab Emirates, whose government the Obama administration thanked for their "humanitarian" contribution -- drawing virtual groans from Stephen Hayes:
In transferring 15 high-risk GTMO detainees, Obama admin thanked UAE for its "humanitarian gesture" - as if problem is GTMO, not terrorists.
— Stephen Hayes (@stephenfhayes) August 16, 2016
Hayes links to a piece by his Weekly Standard colleague Thomas Joscelyn, who reviews the relevant history of each detainee, determining that all them were flagged as "high risk" by Bush-era officials. Years later, Obama's own task force came to essentially the same conclusion about more than half of them:
JTF-GTMO completed its threat assessments before the Obama administration took power, establishing threat categories color coded like a traffic light. The entire detainee population was placed into one of three categories: green (low risk), yellow (medium risk), and red (high risk). JTF-GTMO considered the detainees in the last category—the so-called red-light detainees—to be the highest risk and generally recommended that they be retained in the Defense Department's custody. JTF-GTMO deemed all 15 of the detainees transferred to the UAE to be red-light detainees. President Obama's own Guantanamo Review Task Force determined that 8 of the 15 should be held in detention according to the law of war because they were "too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution." Another one of the detainees was recommended for prosecution, meaning Obama's task force concluded that 9 of the 15 should remain in U.S. custody.
Those bipartisan assessments were overruled by Obama's "periodic review board," which recently decided that the detainees were all suitable to be relinquished from American custody. Who are these men? Joscelyn runs down the list:
According to JTF-GTMO's leaked threat assessments, they include: four former bodyguards for Osama bin Laden (see here, here, here and here); a Yemeni who had a "supervisory role" in bin Laden's "security force"; two members of bin Laden's 55th Arab Brigade, which was al Qaeda's primary paramilitary force in pre-9/11 Afghanistan (see here and here); a "sub-commander" at Osama bin Laden's Tora Bora complex; an al Qaeda "instructor" who swore allegiance to bin Laden; a member of an al Qaeda IED cell that planned to conduct attacks on U.S. and Coalition forces in Afghanistan; an al Qaeda "explosives expert" who "directly assisted the planning and implementing of attacks against U.S. and Coalition forces in Afghanistan"; two al Qaeda operatives "who planned to participate in terrorist operations targeting US forces in Karachi, Pakistan (PK), and possibly inside the United States" (see here and here); and two other now former detainees who allegedly took part in attacks against the United States and its allies in Afghanistan. While the Defense Department portrays the transfer as a "humanitarian" move, the intelligence professionals at JTF-GTMO were more concerned about what these jihadis could do if they returned to the battlefield.
Click through to his piece to follow the hyperlinks to additional documentation. The American people have consistently and overwhelmingly opposed Obama's obsession with closing the US military's facility at Gitmo; the administration has reportedly abandoned its years-long quest to thwart the clear, bipartisan will of Congress. Instead, the president continues to release and transfer jihadi detainees by the bucketload, raising fears about recidivism. That's not just right-wing fear-mongering, either. We know that hundreds of released Gitmo detainees have returned to the battlefield. One participated in the terrorist attack that killed four Americans in Libya. Another took up a senior leadership position with Al Qaeda's deadliest branch. Dozens have reportedly joined ISIS. Yet the releases and transfers continue, even as some of these fanatics have vanished in their new home countries. "Humanitarianism" at work. The Obama/Clinton/Kerry Syria policy continues to crumble before the world's eyes, the 'JV' team's global threat is undiminished (a reality from which the White House deliberately averted its eyes), and all the while, our undeterred president keeps emptying a prison full of dangerous terrorists.
Under the Obama/Clinton foreign policy, the US government has (1) negotiated with terrorists to achieve an illegal hostage release in exchange for five exceptionally dangerous men, (2) paid a $400 million ransom to the Iranian regime, and (3) struck a dangerous nuclear deal with the same illegitimate, anti-American government -- and withheld important details from Congress, violating the law. I'll leave you with Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse fact-checking Team Obama on three recent and false claims about the reckless, failing, and unpopular nuclear agreement:
Smart power.
UPDATE - This is quite literally how ransoms work. What a joke:
new @WSJ piece on the $400 million to Iran with this detail: https://t.co/IdIsyiIyds pic.twitter.com/hp68gFGXs4
— Phil Mattingly (@Phil_Mattingly) August 17, 2016