TERRORISTS FREE TO KILL ONCE AGAIN AS THEY SLIP THE GRASP OF GITMO'S KID GLOVES
BREEDING GROUNDS: Detainees are allowed to pray, keep the Koran (inset), and study other other Islamic texts at Guantanamo Bay. The suspected terrorists have access to anti-Western literature, thanks to the detention camp's library, where books aren't screened for content, unlike those at federal prisons.THE Pentagon now confirms that at least 74 former Guantanamo detainees have resumed terror ist activities after claiming they weren't terrorists.
THE Pentagon now confirms that at least 74 former Guantanamo detainees have resumed terror ist activities after claiming they weren't terroristsSuch recidivism points up an alarming intelligence failure.
These dangerous prisoners should never have been cleared for release. Why did interrogators fail to find the cracks in their stories and alibis?
Why wasn't more intelligence gathered to predict they'd rejoin al Qaeda or the Taliban?
In a word, politics. Gitmo interrogations have been emasculated to placate critics of waterboarding and other "torture," say two senior officials there.
Even known terrorists are spared high-pressure techniques -- tactics that have worked before in squeezing out information.
For that matter, Gitmo doesn't even do "interrogations" anymore. They're now called interviews, and they're voluntary.
Many recidivists used the interviews as an opportunity to argue for release, spinning familiar excuses for why they were in Afghanistan after 9/11. They were freed after interrogators, many of them inexperienced, for the most part bought their sob stories and review boards judged them least likely to return to jihad.
"We have on numerous occasions gotten literally straight-from-the-schoolhouse interrogators who are being stuck in with these hardened jihadists," a top security official at Gitmo told me. "And they essentially look at them and laugh."
He says many are 19-year-olds who lack battlefield skills and don't understand the first thing about jihad and militant Islam.
"They get played by detainees, who end up getting released because the interrogators believe them when they say they don't know anything and just want to go home and be a goat herder," he says.
As a condition of their release, the Gitmo detainees signed pledges to renounce violence and enroll in "reintegration programs" in countries that agreed to repatriate them.
Terrorist Said Ali al-Shihri went through the resort-like Saudi program after his release in 2007.
Afterward, he helped plan last year's deadly attack on the US Embassy in Yemen as al Qaeda's operations chief there.
Another Gitmo recidivist, Slimane Hadj Abderahmane, laughed at the anti-violence agreement he signed. Once free, he re-engaged in terror and said, "This document is toilet paper for the Americans if they want it."
That so many ex-detainees remain violent should come as little surprise, considering Gitmo is now more madrassa than prison camp.
Detainees are fed a diet of violent anti-Western agitprop by sympathetic Muslim chaplains and librarians who have unfettered access to their cell blocks.
The chief librarian at Gitmo, Mohammed Abdelaal, is an Egyptian-born civilian contractor who speaks Arabic.
He has developed an affectionate rapport with the prisoners, who have nicknamed him "Abu Saleh," or Father of Righteousness.
Abdelaal distributes Islamic texts -- some of which contain violent passages that only nourish jihadi bloodlust -- from a library stocked with some 10,000 pieces of Islamic literature and videos.
Command has entrusted him with exclusive control over such materials. In fact, nobody else can so much as touch the Islamic holy texts, which he wraps in white linen -- not even Gitmo's commander.
Why help the Islamic terrorists stay radicalized?
The Federal Bureau of Prisons recently realized that Islamic materials were helping radicalize its Muslim inmate population. So it purged its libraries of such books. It also no longer lets Muslim chaplains in the pen unescorted.
Guards now accompany them to prison chapels to make sure they preach in English.
At Gitmo, chaplains have on-demand access to detainees and minister to them in Arabic; library materials aren't screened for violent or anti-Western content. Is it any wonder so many detainees have rejoined the jihad?
Now we're even offering them formal classes in English, which will only help them appear more mainstream and raise their chances of slipping through security checkpoints if they should ever be released inside America. This is a genuine fear, seeing how President Obama has allowed at least one detainee to stand trial in New York.
If the president has his way, the remaining 240 hard-core Gitmo detainees could be transferred to America along with him.
The ultimate fear is that federal judges will find technicalities and release some.
Then we'll have terrorists immersed in hateful jihadi literature walking the streets of our cities instead of kicking soccer balls behind the wire in Cuba.
Paul Sperry, a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of "Infiltration," is working on a new book on the Muslim Brotherhood.
Best-celler
In his 1938 book, "The Meaning of the Holy Qur'an," Bombay-born civil servant Abdullah Yusuf Ali translated Islam's central text into English -- and peppered it with racist and incendiary comments. The book is a hit with detainees at Guantanamo Bay, where it circulates widely. It talks about launching jihad, gives combat advice and warns that Jews are "men without faith." Some samples: "When once the fight [jihad] is entered upon, carry it out with utmost vigor and strike home your blows at the most vital points. Smite at their necks, both literally and figuratively. You cannot wage war with kid gloves."