What About The WHY?

The New York Times has a front page story today about former Guantanamo Bay detainee Said Ali al-Shihri and how he has now risen to the number two Al Queda figure in Yemen. The first line of the article goes like this.

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 President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year.

Now I for one was puzzled by such a pronouncement. For one President Obama's executive order says absolutely nothing about releasing detainees. He and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs both stated that a plan is still being formulated to deal with the disposition of the detainees. But bigger than that al-Shihri was released by the Bush Administration. If he went back to terrorism shouldn't that instead be an indictment of THEIR policy with respect to detainees?

Now I realize that there are some detainees at GITMO that have become causes for the ACLU and other civil libertarion groups. However most of those cases involved people being detained without much if any credible evidence to support the arrest. And to my knowledge there was not a single solitary civil libertarian group working to free al-Shiri. So I was very interested to see what his story was. Was he an obviously innoncent person who was radicalized by his detention? Not from the story the NYTimes tells.

Mr. Shihri, 35, trained in urban warfare tactics at a camp north of Kabul, Afghanistan, according to documents released by the Pentagon as part of his Guantánamo dossier. Two weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he traveled to Afghanistan via Bahrain and Pakistan, and he later told American investigators that his intention was to do relief work, the documents say. He was wounded in an airstrike and spent a month and a half recovering in a hospital in Pakistan.

The documents state that Mr. Shihri met with a group of “extremists” in Iran and helped them get into Afghanistan. They also say he was accused of trying to arrange the assassination of a writer, in accordance with a fatwa, or religious order, issued by an extremist cleric.

So to recap, this guy was suspected of attending terrorist training camps, meeting with extremists in Iran and helping them get into Afghanistan and attempting to have a journalist killed. That is pretty heavy stuff. Now I don't know how credible their evidence was or wasn't but something compelled them to detain the guy in the first place. Now the biggest question that came to my mind was why did they release him if he supposedly did all of these terrorist activities? Well as far as I can tell from the article, it was because he used "I didn't do it" defense.

However, under a heading describing reasons for Mr. Shihri’s possible release from Guantánamo, the documents say he claimed that he traveled to Iran “to purchase carpets for his store” in Saudi Arabia. They also say that he denied knowledge of any terrorists or terrorist activities, and that he “related that if released, he would like to return to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, wherein he would reunite with his family.”

“The detainee stated he would attempt to work at his family’s furniture store if it is still in business,” the documents say.

Well the ironic thing is, of course, that damn near every criminal uses that same defense. And what makes it worse is that there are "enemy combatants" STILL detained at GITMO who have a helluva lot more evidence that they didn't commit the crimes they are being held for. So what gives? And my question to the NYTimes why didn't they more vigorously try to get to the bottom of it?

What would have compelled the Bush Administration to release this man? Was he tortured? Did he give up information? And why didn't the NYTimes purse that question? Its unthinkable to me for them to write the article without it occuring to them that maybe the bigger story is how the guy got out in the first place. I realize that the wingnuts wouldn't be interested in the focus not being on how some how this case reflects badly on President Obama but you would think the "grey lady" would have a different motivation.

As John Cole points out this story is more of an indictment of the Bush Administration than it is any statement about President Obama's executive orders. Hopefully someone out there reading this will start asking some of the same questions that I have.