Gut Check for the ‘Close Guantanamo’ Crowd


Author: Jeff Breinholt

Date Published: 2008-05-04


Gut Check for the ‘Close Guantanamo’ Crowd

Jeffrey Breinholt

Part of the public campaign to close Guantanamo involves the claim that it houses many innocent people who were swept up from the battlefields where the U.S. military is operating. Now it’s been reported that someone released from Guantanamo has died in a suicide attack in Iraq. Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi, a Kuwaiti national, reportedly killed himself in an attack in Mosul. He had been held in Guantanamo until his 2005 release and repatriation.

Fortunately, we have not recently suffered the spectacle of prominent Americans traveling to enemy territory to announce their hope that they will succeed in defeating the United States, like Jane Fonda’s notorious trip to Hanoi. This suggests that even Americans who are critical of our foreign policy are careful to stop short of expressing their hope that Iraqi insurgents kill their fellow Americans. Even to them, al-Ajmi should be a villain.

The news of this incident, if true, shows this: we had the right guy. Could it be that he was innocent when arrested but became radicalized as a result of our invasion of Iraq? Perhaps, but this would be a strange thing for someone from Kuwait, which Iraq invaded in 1990.

People as prominent as Defense Secretary Robert Gates have called for the gradual closing of the Guantanamo prison. It will happen as soon as practically possible. Even if it is a gulag (which I doubt, given that the average prisoner has gained weight while incarcerated there), critics have not offered a satisfactory idea for how we should handle the remaining prisoners as part of the closure. The al-Ajmi news shows mass emancipation is hardly the answer, nor is the transfer of these prisoners stateside, where they could claim asylum and stay with us with indefinitely. Would you want al-Ajmi living in your hometown?

It is easy for human rights organizations to criticize Gitmo. The harder problem is finding an acceptable solution to detain terrorists willing to give their lives to kill us. So far, the best one seems to be the Military Tribunals, which might have offered a better alternative than repatriating Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi to Kuwait, where could try to kill those who helped liberate his home country on behalf of those who invaded it.

The views in this article are not those of the Department if Justice.

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FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Jeff Breinholt is a Senior Fellow and Director of National Security Law at the International Assessment and Strategy Center (www.strategycenter.net.)  Jeff blogs on the Counterterrorism Blog. 

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