Keep Gitmo Going

The case for retaining the vital detention and interrogation facility at Guantánamo Bay

E.J. Kimball, esq.

Benjamin Lerner, esq.

MAY 28, 2009

On January 22, 2009, President Barack Obama issued an Executive Order (EO) mandating the closure of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility (Guantánamo) within one year.[1]  About two-thirds of the nearly 800 detainees held at Guantánamo have either been repatriated to their home country or released to a third-party country; none have been released outright.[2]   The EO presumes that closure of the facility will “further the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice.”[3]  There is ample evidence to contradict such a presumption.

The inmates currently housed at Guantánamo are not mere criminals – they are hardened Islamist terrorists who believe they have a religious duty to kill Americans and destroy the United States, and will sacrifice even their own lives to accomplish this objective.  Of the nearly 500 detainees who have been moved from Guantánamo, at least 61 have returned to terrorism according to official Department of Defense reports.[4]  Some sources within the Pentagon have indicated that the number of former Guantánamo detainees that have returned to terrorism may be much higher, at 100 or more.[5]

This direct threat to American national security was made apparent when the U.S.embassy in Yemenwas attacked on September 17, 2008.  Eleven people were killed, including Susan Elbaneh, an eighteen-year-old Muslim American teenager from upstate New York.  The purported leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen, the group responsible for the attack, is Said Ali al-Shihri, a former Guantánamo detainee.[6]

The most lethal attack by a former Guantánamo detainee took place last March 23 when Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi, released in 2005, carried out a suicide attack in Mosul, detonating a 10,000 pound truck bomb that killed 13 soldiers from the 2^nd Iraqi army division and injured 42 others.  An Al Qaeda website praising the attack called him the “Lion of Guantánamo.”[7]

Additionally, the Taliban’s top operational officer in southern Afghanistanas of March 2009, Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, is a former Guantánamo detainee who returned to the Taliban after being transferred from Guantánamo to Afghan authorities, which in turn released him.[8]  Other released detainees have been documented participating in terrorist activities with-al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, Turkey, Morocco, Russia, and Iraq.[9]