Meet the Jihadist War Criminal Obama Plans to Release from Gitmo

At AEI’s blog, Marc Thiessen provides the low-down on Mullah Mohammed Fazi, one of the Taliban terrorists President Obama envisions releasing from Gitmo, in return for … nothing — it is the super-power’s way to plead with the terrorists to please please come to the negotiating table, nothing more (although I’m certain it makes our “mediator’s” day).

As Marc recounts, Fazi is still detained because the military assessed him to be a “high risk,” if released, to return to the jihad and kill Americans. He is also wanted by the U.N. for war crimes, implicated in the murder of thousands of Shiites while serving as the (Sunni) Taliban’s army chief of staff. Moreover, he is a narcotics trafficker; he has continued agitating against the U.S. while detained at Gitmo; he is so high up in the Taliban that he got away with threatening the organization’s emir, Mullah Omar; and our military concluded that he would pose a threat to the Afghan government — the construction of which is a large part of the reason our forces have been putting their lives on the line in Afghanistan for a decade.  

Marc includes our military’s own threat assessment spelling the above out in painful detail. He also refers to a post by Michael Rubin with these important observations:

Obama has sought not only to engage the late Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi, current Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, but also Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. In each case, poorly considered dialogue backfired on U.S. interests and, more often than not, on the people living under the thumbs of these dictators or Islamist groups.

Now word comes that Obama wants not only to talk to the Taliban, but also to reward it for coming to the table by releasing high-value detainees before a new round of talks even begins. Forgotten is the fact that between 1995 and 2000, the Clinton administration and its State Department undertook high-level negotiations with the same Taliban leaders who lied and stalled, hemmed and hawed, in order to protect Osama Bin Laden as he planned 9/11. Alas, just over a decade after 9/11, Obama and his aides seem intent on repeating the mistakes that led to that day.