As President Obama’s last year in office winds down and he comes to the realization that he won’t be able to close the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention facility like he promised in 2008, he’s been busy transferring inmates to other countries as a fallback plan. This month, Obama has sent Osama bin Laden’s alleged bodyguard to the country of Montenegro.
Abdel Malik Ahmed Abdel Wahab al-Rahabi has been held at Gitmo for 14 years but will now get a change of scenery, with the administration deciding that the bin Laden associate is no longer a threat to the U.S. and recommending his transfer. And according to NBC News, the Department of Defense insists that the transfer is “consistent with appropriate security and humane treatment measures.
Announcing the move, the administration thanked the small Eastern European nation for taking the accused terrorist off America’s hands
Montenegro, a small country situated between Bosnia, and Herzegovina, and Albania, and across from Italy on the Adriatic Sea, said it would release al-Rahabi once it takes custody of him, allowing him to “return to his family.”
Al-Rahabi was detained in 2001 by Pakistani forces then transferred to Gitmo a month after his arrest.
Pentagon documents say the prisoner is related to bin Laden by marriage and was trained to hijack airliners and fly a suicide mission in conjunction with the 9/11 attacks. For whatever reason, the detainee never committed to the suicide mission.
Claiming to close the Guantanamo facility was one of the first actions Obama took when he first entered office in 2008 when he signed an Executive Order promising he would shut the facility down in the first year of his presidency.
Closing the detention center was one of Obama’s main campaign promises, but in spite of his promises and the Executive Order he immediately issued upon entering the White House, Obama never did shutter the facility. Instead, he began a campaign of transferring prisoners from the facility to nations that volunteered to take them.
But since he began his program of freeing prisoners by transferring them, well over 100 have simply returned to the battlefields to kill westerners in general and Americans in particular.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston, or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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