President Barack Obama reiterated his determination to release the jihadi prisoners now securely held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in his 2015 State of the Union speech Tuesday.
“Since I’ve been president, we’ve worked responsibly to cut the population of GTMO in half,” he told Congress. “Now it’s time to finish the job…I will not relent in my determination to shut it down. It’s not who we are.”
He made that claim even though many released jihadis have returned to jihad against Americans, Europeans and allied countries.
“I tell you the [recidivist] numbers have got to be at least 50-percent,” retired CIA officer Gary Berntsen told Fox News Jan. 17.
“Many of these people that we captured would tell us right to our faces: We’re going to be released and kill you and your families when we get out,” Berntsen said. “That’s their attitude… they want to continue the fight against us, and the administration’s release of these guys is insane.”
This month, news reports revealed that a jihadi released in 2007 is now running an ISIS group in Afghanistan.
Also, many of the 122 remaining jihadis are from Yemen, whose government is collapsing under an Iranian-backed rebellion by Houthi tribesmen.
In mid-January, Obama released five more Yemeni jihadis. Four were sent to Europe, and one to Oman, a country in the Persian Gulf.
Europe faces similar problems. All three of the jihadis who killed 17 French journalists, cops and Jews in January were released from jail.
But despite the costs and risks, Obama isn’t changing his determination to release the jihadis. “As Americans, we have a profound commitment to justice — so it makes no sense to spend three million dollars per prisoner to keep open a prison that the world condemns and terrorists use to recruit,” he said.