On the worst of the worst. Well one of them anyway.
by digby
We've heard a lot about the "worst of the worst" at Gitmo over the years and most of it's turned out to be BS. nbsp;So too have the lurid assertions about the Taliban prisoners in the Bergdahl swap. The LA Times has the whole story here:
A closer look at the former prisoners, however, indicates that not all were hard-core militants. Three held political positions in the Taliban government that ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 and were considered relative moderates. A fourth was a mid-level police official, experts say.
The fifth, however, has a darker past. Mohammed Fazl was chief of staff of the Taliban army and is accused of commanding forces that massacred hundreds of civilians in the final years of Taliban rule before the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. He was arrested in November 2001 after surrendering to U.S.-allied warlords in northern Afghanistan.
"Fazl is the only one of the five to face accusations of explicit war crimes and they are, indeed, extremely serious," Kate Clark of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a Kabul-based research group, wrote in a commentary published Wednesday.
The backgrounds of the prisoners, who are confined to the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar for one year under the terms of the exchange, indicate that they would have little utility on the battlefield after more than a decade in prison. They range in age from 43 to 47.
I'm sure these are not guys you'd want your daughter to marry. Nobody likes the Taliban. But there are many thousands of Muslim extremists all over the world who are younger and stronger and more than capable of leading their movement --- and who will no doubt be less than willing to step aside for these old lower level duffers who were caught up in Afghan politics and the Taliban revolution, not jihad against America. Even the one who is obviously a war criminal is accused of committing war crimes against other Afghans not the US.
And anyway, the idea that any single individual is so dangerous that to let them go is to jeopardize national security betrays either a very cynical PR strategy or a very stupid threat assessment. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but there will never come a day when we've imprisoned or killed all the "bad guys." New ones are born every day --- many of them because of that godforsaken black hole of a prison camp where we are holding people forever.
If all these patriots were really concerned about national security they'd be for closing Guantanamo instead of holding on to a rapidly aging group of prisoners, turning them into martyrs, and pretending that it is keeping us safe. It's doing the opposite.
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