Obama sends enemy reinforcements from Gitmo

Fox News:

Prior to his release in December, Abdul Hafiz was Prisoner Number 1030 at Guantanamo Bay. Now, less than four months later, he's back home in Afghanistan and working for the Taliban -- just the latest of more than 100 released detainees who have returned to terrorism, according to the Pentagon.

Hafiz, suspected in the March 2003 kidnapping and murder of an International Red Cross worker, was the "Taliban head of all Madrassas ... responsible for recruiting and sending young men to fight for the Taliban," according to U.S. government memos. He was said to have maintained contacts for Mullah Mohammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban of Afghanistan, and to have admitted to participating in jihad against the Soviets.

But despite the list of charges against him, the U.S. government transferred Hafiz to his home country in December. And now, a senior U.S. official tells Fox News, he is back on the battlefield. According to a published report, Hafiz has been appointed by Mullah Omar to oversee ransom demands for kidnapping victims and to coordinate with nongovernment-aid organizations operating in the Taliban's areas of influence.

That makes Hafiz just the latest addition to an increasingly long list of former Guantanamo detainees suspected to have returned to terror. The Pentagon, in an estimate issued in January, now believes that roughly 20 percent of the 560 detainees who were released from Guantanamo are back on the terror front lines.

Click here to see more examples of suspected recidivists.

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And though the current estimate is higher than ever, it's still a "low-ball" one, says Lt. Col. Jeff Addicott, a former Green Beret and judge advocate general and director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University.

"I'd say the figure is probably closer to 30 to 40 percent," Addicott told FoxNews.com. "A lot of these folks go underground, they change their name, they hide out a little bit, they pop back up."

Addicott says part of the problem is the push to rehabilitate enemy combatants who can't be rehabilitated.

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There is much more.

We need to keep Gitmo open and we need to keep the enemy locked up there until the war is over with. All this releasing of enemy detainees has gained us nothing and has gained the enemy even more than his propaganda about Gitmo. While it is true that many of the recidivist detainees were released by the Bush administration, an intelligent person should learn from that explerience and not repeat it or double down on it.