Informative post from The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto. I don't fully agree with the process and methods at Guantanamo Bay, but in many cases it is necessary:
From Detainee to Detonatee
"A Kuwaiti man released from the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay in 2005 has carried out a suicide bombing in Iraq, his cousin told Al Arabiya television on Thursday," Reuters reports from Dubai:
A friend of Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi in Iraq informed his family that Abdullah carried out the attack in Mosul, his cousin Salem told the Dubai-based television channel.
"We were shocked by the painful news we received this afternoon . . . through a call from one of the friend's of martyr Abdullah in Iraq," said Salem al-Ajmi in a telephone interview aired by Arabiya.
He did not say when the suicide bombing happened.
Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, blogger and law professor Jonathan Adler makes a manful effort at evenhandedness:
What does this prove? Nothing really, but I'm sure partisans in the debate over Guantanamo and the treatment and detention of alleged [sic] enemy combatants will see this as evidence that confirms their respective points of view. On the one hand, Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi may have been a dangerous enemy combatant all along, and should never have been released. On the other hand, he may have been wrongfully detained in the first place, only to become radicalized by his (mis)treatment by the U.S. military. In other words, we either had a terrorist and let him go, or we created one.
If Adler is right, though, he has focused on a trivial difference between the two sides of the debate while ignoring both an important point of agreement and the truly crucial area of contention.
According to Adler, both sides agree that the detainees at Guantanamo are terrorists, differing only over how they became terrorists. The real distinction is that one side (the side this column is on, in case it's not clear) favors keeping the terrorists at Guantanamo so as to prevent terrorism, whereas the other side wants to release the terrorists so that they can murder more Muslims in Iraq and elsewhere.
Well, one thing I disagree with Alder is that we created a terrorist. I highly doubt that, and such stories are only in Hollywood films.
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