One of the stories that made it to today's NYTs' first online page is "Freed by U.S., Saudi Becomes a Qaeda Chief," by Robert Worth. The story worth the reader’s while, not because there is anything informative or analytically valuable in it, but because it is a good example for agitprop and bad journalism. Mind you that this story is being published—by no right-wing media outlet—a day after Obama’s order for the closure of Guantánamo in one year.
The story opens with this sentence: "The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year." It makes one more reference to this analysis during the entire story and goes on telling the tale of this one guy, "Said Ali al-Shihri," who has recently surfaced as a high ranking Al-Qaeda member in Yemen. This person was apparently released from Guantánamo in 2007 and has gone through some special schooling/rehabilitation by the Saudis (funded by the U.S.).
The reporting is extremely poor. It is full of graphs like this: "The documents state that Mr. Shihri met with a group of “extremists” in Iran and helped them get into Afghanistan. They also say he was accused of trying to arrange the assassination of a writer, in accordance with a fatwa, or religious order, issued by an extremist cleric." I have always thought that intelligence reporting is one of the easier branches of journalistic reporting as can ignore the conventional need to be clear and make sensible references, but this story is an epic. It is full of buzz-words such as "Iran," "Afghanistan," "fatwa" and "extremist cleric." But it gives out no information what so ever and merely talks about “a writer,” “a fatwa,” “a group of extremists” and so on.
Regardless of its bad reporting, the efforts of the author is focused on proving that the guy who has been identified as "Abu Sayyaf al-Shihri"—the new deputy leader of Yemen's branch of Al-Qaeda (whatever that means)—is in fact the person who has been released from Guantánamo prison in 2007.
The question is: Even if this al-Shihri is the same as the one released in 2007, how is this underscoring "the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed" to shut down Guantánamo? If anything, the raise that al-Shihri gained—from a simple operative going through training to being the "Deputy"—means that Guantánamo is not working. Different hypothesis follow:
1. Guantánamo is actually a great training ground for low-ranking militants;
2. The simple fact that someone who has been to Guantánamo can get him such a decent promotion in his respective terrorist organization, is harmful to the cause of “war on terror!”
3. People like al-Shihri are being kept and trained in Guantánamo as CIA operatives. They then go back to their respective organizations and spy for the U.S. Now that this training center is being threatened, they are purposefully leaking the information about al-Shihri (keeping his real allegiances secret) to undermine Obama’s intention to close Guantánamo down.
These, and many more similar scenarios, can contradict the analysis presented by Robert Worth. But I guess NYT will not publish any of such controversial analysis.
One more entertaining point about this story and done:
An American official is quoted in this article as saying: "The lesson here is, whoever receives former Guantánamo detainees needs to keep a close eye on them." Hell yeah. That is the lesson. But not because they are necessarily inherently dangerous, but because by arresting them as a terrorist suspect and by keeping and "training" them in places like Guantánamo, CIA is in fact closing all other doors to them and pushes them to pursue the only remaining viable career: terrorism. Would any of those “respectable” business managers working for American companies in Saudi Arabia give a former Guantánamo detainee a job? Would those former prisoners be able to travel freely between countries? And would they be able to return to a normal life, even if they want, after the traumatic years of Guantánamo and no psychological, financial or community support available to them? But there is one community who will give them all: the terrorist community. So they join.
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