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The article today in the International Herald Tribune points out the naivete Obama policy of shuttering Guantanamo:
BEIRUT: The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda's Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order that President Barack Obama signed that the detention center be shut down within a year.
The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Yemen's capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.
The key element is an attempt at rehabilitation...which depends on the environment, watchful eyes and constant nurturing in the correct direction.
The development came as Republican legislators criticized the plan to close the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in the absence of any measures for dealing with current detainees. But it also helps explain why the new administration wants to move cautiously, taking time to work out a plan to cope with the complications.
Almost half the camp's remaining detainees are Yemenis, and efforts to repatriate them depend in part on the creation of a Yemeni rehabilitation program - financed in part by the United States - similar to the Saudi one. The Saudi government has claimed that no graduate of its program has returned to terrorism.
"The lesson here is: Whoever receives former Guantánamo detainees needs to keep a close eye on them," the U.S. official said.
Although the Pentagon has said that dozens of released Guantánamo detainees have "returned to the fight," its claim is difficult to document and has been met with skepticism. In any case, few of the former detainees, if any, are thought to have joined the leadership of a major terrorist organization like Al Qaeda in Yemen, a mostly homegrown group that experts say has been reinforced lately by an infusion of foreign fighters.
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