For the surviving daughter of one of the thousands of 9/11 victims, it’s “fertilizing ground for another terrorist attack.” For Florida Se...
For the surviving daughter of one of the thousands of 9/11 victims, it’s “fertilizing ground for another terrorist attack.”
For Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, it’s a “massive error” that’s going to pose a direct threat to U.S. national security.
But for every American, President Joe Biden’s decision to release a man suspected of trying to be part of the terror ring that attacked the United States two decades ago should be something even more:
Proof positive that the Biden administration is unfit to govern the greatest country in the world.
According to a Department of Defense statement issued Monday, Mohammad Mani Ahmad al-Qahtani, a Saudi national who was part of the ring that committed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and was captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2001, has been released from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay and returned to his homeland.
According to The Associated Press, al-Qahtani has “suffered from mental illness, including schizophrenia” since childhood.
In a January 2009 interview with journalist Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, in the twilight days of the George W. Bush administration, Susan J. Crawford, the retired judge in charge of the military commission overseeing trials for Guantanamo Bay inmates, said she’d decided that the military’s treatment of al-Qahtani amounted to torture, though the individual interrogation techniques used on him had all been approved.
Crawford dismissed war crimes charges against him but told Woodward that didn’t mean he should be released.
“He’s a very dangerous man,” she said. “What do you do with him now if you don’t charge him and try him? I would be hesitant to say, ‘Let him go.'”
That was then, this is now.
And now the Biden administration is in charge of making a hash out of pretty much every aspect of American government policy, including, it turns out, releasing terrorist prisoners with a direct connection to the deadliest attack on American soil in the country’s history.
Angela Mistrulli, who was 17 when her father, Joseph, died in the World Trade Center’s South Tower, told the U.K.’s Daily Mail the decision could mean even more danger in the future.
“I think it’s very sad to be a child of someone who was killed on 9/11 not to have a day in court for my father and the 3,000 other people who were murdered,” she told the outlet. “I find it more and more that they are taking away [our] ability to prosecute and get the truth.”
“It concerns me that the administration is fertilizing the ground for another terrorist attack.”
There’s good reason to think so.
Back in 2014, when President Barack Obama was in the Oval Office and Joe Biden was making his family rich as vice president, the Democratic brain trust in the White House decided it would be a good idea to release five hardened terrorist prisoners from Guantanamo in exchange for the release of one American Army deserter who’d been captured in Afghanistan.
One result of that move was evident after Biden, now in the White House, oversaw the chaotic, humiliating U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Four of the five men released were part of the new Taliban government of the country. And one of them was considered a mastermind of the Taliban’s return to power.
That kind of record was clearly what Rubio had in mind when he issued a statement Monday calling the al-Qahtani decision “much worse than a lapse in judgment.”
“Al-Qahtani is a terrorist who made it his life goal to kill Americans. I believe he remains committed to jihad and the destruction of the United States,” Rubio said in the statement.
“Now, because of the Biden Administration’s misguided policies, he has the opportunity to once again return to the battlefield. The decision to transfer al-Qahtani is not simply a lapse in judgment, it is a massive error which poses a serious risk to our national security and the security of our allies.”
The terrorist’s advocates in the U.S. see it differently, of course.
“After two decades without trial in U.S. custody, Mohammed will now receive the psychiatric care he has long needed in Saudi Arabia, with the support of his family,” one of his lawyers, City University of New York law professor Ramzi Kassem, told the AP.
“Keeping him at Guantanamo, where he was tortured, and then repeatedly attempted suicide, would have been a likely death sentence.”
Perish the thought that a close associate of 9/11 mastermind Mohammed Atta would remain in captivity under a death sentence.
This is a man whose direct participation in an attack that killed almost 3,000 Americans was thwarted only by immigration officers at Orlando International Airport in Florida in August 2001, according to the AP.
Al-Qahtani has been considered the “20th hijacker” in the 9/11 plot (an appellation that also has been bestowed on Zacarias Moussaoui, another member of the plot who, thankfully, remains in prison). Atta was even going to pick al-Qahtani up at the airport when al-Qahtani was detained, according to the AP.
This is a man who was captured on the battlefield at Tora Bora, Afghanistan, where al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden got out one step ahead of the American military.
He’s been under his own death sentence ever since he decided to wage terrorist warfare against the United States. The past two decades in custody have been a reprieve.
Even in the progressive-dominated world of social media, there were plenty of users disgusted by the news of his release.
It’s worth noting that, according to the AP, al-Qahtani’s lawyers obtained a court order in 2020 that required a medical examination of the prisoner and could have resulted in his release. To its credit, then-President Donald Trump’s administration fought the order — a fight that was dropped when Biden took office.
So, anything Trump did, Biden must do the reverse — no matter what the danger it might pose to the country.
But the bigger issue here is the Biden administration’s willingness to go to any length to satisfy the leftist agenda even when it’s a risk to the country he’s sworn to protect.
Besides the eternally damning chaos in Kabul, he has opened the country’s southern borders to an invasion of illegal immigrants without any thought as to whether they could present a danger to his citizens. He is even now pursuing a new nuclear deal with the mullahs of Iran that would only benefit the terrorist state in Tehran, and on Monday, he released a known, committed terrorist from Guantanamo Bay to the auspices of Saudi Arabia, the homeland of the 9/11 plot.
Even if al-Qahtani never takes up arms against the United States again, the fact that he’s been released from American custody to live even a semblance of freedom is a disgrace.
With every passing day, the midterm elections draw closer, and with every passing day, American citizens get closer to righting the terrible wrong that was the result of the 2020 presidential election.
Biden and his party have no business in power in the United States. Soon, sane voters are going to be able to do something about it.
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