And why not? “Detainees are fed a diet of violent anti-Western agitprop by sympathetic Muslim chaplains and librarians who have unfettered access to their cell blocks.”
“Terrorists Free to Kill Once Again As They Slip the Grasp of Gitmo’s Kid Gloves,” by Paul Sperry in the New York Post, June 7 (thanks to Paul):
THE Pentagon now confirms that at least 74 former Guantanamo detainees have resumed terror ist activities after claiming they weren’t terrorists.
Such recidivism points up an alarming intelligence failure.
These dangerous prisoners should never have been cleared for release. Why did interrogators fail to find the cracks in their stories and alibis?
Why wasn’t more intelligence gathered to predict they’d rejoin al Qaeda or the Taliban?…
In part because interrogators don’t even know what to ask for or look for, because they aren’t taught anything about the doctrine of jihad and Islamic supremacism.
And there aren’t any interrogators anymore, anyway:
For that matter, Gitmo doesn’t even do “interrogations” anymore. They’re now called interviews, and they’re voluntary.
Many recidivists used the interviews as an opportunity to argue for release, spinning familiar excuses for why they were in Afghanistan after 9/11. They were freed after interrogators, many of them inexperienced, for the most part bought their sob stories and review boards judged them least likely to return to jihad.
“We have on numerous occasions gotten literally straight-from-the-schoolhouse interrogators who are being stuck in with these hardened jihadists,” a top security official at Gitmo told me. “And they essentially look at them and laugh.”
Even the ones who aren’t straight-from-the-schoolhouse generally don’t know anything about jihad and Islam except what their instructors, who themselves have learned everything they know from John Esposito and Reza Aslan, have told them.
He says many are 19-year-olds who lack battlefield skills and don’t understand the first thing about jihad and militant Islam.
“They get played by detainees, who end up getting released because the interrogators believe them when they say they don’t know anything and just want to go home and be a goat herder,” he says.
As a condition of their release, the Gitmo detainees signed pledges to renounce violence and enroll in “reintegration programs” in countries that agreed to repatriate them.
Terrorist Said Ali al-Shihri went through the resort-like Saudi program after his release in 2007.
Afterward, he helped plan last year’s deadly attack on the US Embassy in Yemen as al Qaeda’s operations chief there.
Another Gitmo recidivist, Slimane Hadj Abderahmane, laughed at the anti-violence agreement he signed. Once free, he re-engaged in terror and said, “This document is toilet paper for the Americans if they want it.”
That so many ex-detainees remain violent should come as little surprise, considering Gitmo is now more madrassa than prison camp.
Detainees are fed a diet of violent anti-Western agitprop by sympathetic Muslim chaplains and librarians who have unfettered access to their cell blocks.
The chief librarian at Gitmo, Mohammed Abdelaal, is an Egyptian-born civilian contractor who speaks Arabic….
Abdelaal distributes Islamic texts — some of which contain violent passages that only nourish jihadi bloodlust — from a library stocked with some 10,000 pieces of Islamic literature and videos.
Command has entrusted him with exclusive control over such materials. In fact, nobody else can so much as touch the Islamic holy texts, which he wraps in white linen — not even Gitmo’s commander….