The Price of liberal good will for releasing terrorist will be paid in blood

Opinion Journal:

In recent months, Osama bin Laden's ancestral homeland of Yemen has come into its own as al Qaeda's safe haven on the Arabian peninsula. Now a U.S. court and the Obama Administration may send a batch of potential terrorists there.

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler last week ordered the release of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, a 25-year-old Yemeni arrested in Pakistan and held at Guantanamo since 2002, citing lack of evidence. She told Washington to talk to Yemen about taking him back. The Administration already is grappling with what to do with nearly 100 Yemenis still left at Gitmo, which President Obama unwisely ordered closed by January. The U.S. is reluctant to repatriate them to a country where al Qaeda suspects regularly "escape" from jail.

Only Pakistan's tribal regions rival Yemen as a terrorist Shangri-La. As al Qaeda suffered setbacks in Saudi Arabia and post-surge Iraq, Islamist Web sites urged jihadis to head to Yemen. Three unruly tribal provinces bordering Saudi Arabia -- a so-called triangle of evil -- and active insurgencies in the north and south make the country of 22 million a good sanctuary.

The root of the problem is the government's tacit non-aggression pact with al Qaeda. Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh tells American officials he can't push too hard, and for too long the U.S. has indulged him. The Saudis used to play this same double game. Then al Qaeda attacks killed some 200 people and jolted them into a crackdown. The Kingdom has been free of terrorist violence for the past three years.

But the threat is now regathering in Yemen. In 2002, a CIA Hellfire missile took out Abu Ali al-Harithi, the leader of al Qaeda in Yemen. His replacement was also captured, but then the government backed off. A new generation of leaders emerged after 23 Yemenis, including at least a dozen al Qaeda members, dug a tunnel out of a Yemen jail cell to a nearby mosque. The escape had all the signs of an inside job, and most of the escapees are still free.

Among them is Nasir al-Wahayshi, a 33-year-old who now runs al Qaeda in Yemen. In January, the group "merged" with the Saudi al Qaeda chapter, with al-Wahayshi now "emir of the Arabian peninsula." By the Yemen foreign minister's own estimate, between 1,000-1,500 al Qaeda and like-minded fighters are in the country. The U.S. embassy was attacked with a mortar last March and six suicide bombers blew themselves up in front of the compound in September, killing 13.

The U.S. is in talks with the Saudis and Yemenis about the Gitmo detainees. American officials favor putting them through a Saudi rehabilitation center before release. That's almost as risky as sending them directly to Yemen. Eleven former Saudi Gitmo inmates who went through rehab are back on the government's most wanted terrorist list. Said Ali al-Shihri turned up in a January video as al Qaeda's No. 2 man on the Arabian peninsula based in Yemen. If some of the Yemenis rejoined the global jihad -- and the odds suggest they would -- all that alleged "global good will" won for closing Gitmo will have come at far too high a price.

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Yemen is somewhat like Pakistan in its attitude toward fighting the Islamic religious bigots. It also is a master of doing the minimum to keep the US off its back while allowing the terrorist to survive to continue their war against us. Obama's theory that keeping Gitmo somehow creates more terrorist is based on an invalid assumption of the root causes of terrorist which are based on religious bigotry that exists outside our attempts to fight back.

Releasing terrorist does not create fewer terrorist, but instead allows terrorist to get back to the business of fighting us and recruiting more terrorist. It is a fundamental flaw of liberalism to perceive our actions as the cause for the actions of the enemy. This has been at the heart of liberal arguments since at least Henry Wallace was blaming the Truman administration for Stalin's actions against Europe. It is a false premise that needs to be challenged before Obama gets more Americans killed by releasing terrorist.