The Making of a Terrorist Cell

Barack Obama made a promise prior to his election (one echoed by John McCain by the way) that the Guantanamo terrorist detention facility needed to be shut down. Accusations of torture and the denial of basic human rights were at the center of the firestorm, never mind that the most severe form of interrogation techniques, the waterboard, was never indiscriminately applied to detainees gratuitously or without proper review.

During its follow up on the campaign promise to close the camp, the Obama administration has run into a little snag, namely that

[after a review of] the Uighurs detention, the inter-agency panel found that they weren’t the ignorant, innocent goatherds the White House believed them to be. The committee determined they were too dangerous to release because they were members of the ETIM terrorist group, the “East Turkistan Islamic Movement,” and because their presence at the al-Queda training camp was no accident.

So, what should a fledgling administration do when its own review of terrorist detainees reveals that the terrorists are, indeed, a dangerous threat and should not be released?

Do over!

Would anyone be surprised if, indeed, the Obama administration is overruling the intelligence community in order to implement preconceived policy preferences? Would anyone be surprised if those policy preferences include erring on the side of aiding suspected terrorists (to "repair our image," of course) rather than protecting the United States?

As Babbin puts it, "there is now no ETIM terrorist cell in the United States: there will be one if these Uighurs are released into the United States."