The Daqduq Disgrace
Obama releases a terrorist rather than send him to Gitmo.
One of the most widely photographed acts of President Obama's first year in office was his symbolic pre-dawn salute to the caskets of U.S. soldiers returning to Dover Air Force Base. In the case of a terrorist named Ali Musa Daqduq, who was released yesterday from U.S. custody in Iraq, the President is letting down those fallen soldiers and their families.
Daqduq is a Lebanese national and top Hezbollah operative who in January 2007 masterminded the ambush, kidnapping and murder of five American soldiers in the Iraqi city of Karbala. Arrested by U.S. forces in Basra two months later, Daqduq is said to have initially pretended to be deaf and mute. But he eventually talked, giving U.S. interrogators an extensive picture of the ways in which Iran was arming and training Iraq's insurgents.
Now Daqduq is in Iraqi custody—released, according to the Administration, because it could not lawfully do otherwise. "We have sought and received assurances [from the Iraqi government] that he will be tried for his crimes," said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council.
Mr. Vietor surely knows the likelier outcome is that Daqduq will be released or acquitted so that he can rejoin his comrades in Beirut or Tehran. The Iraqi government has already released some 50 other prisoners responsible for attacks on U.S. forces.
The Administration contends that its hands were tied by the U.S.-Iraq status-of-forces agreement negotiated by the Bush Administration, which required Iraq's consent—not forthcoming—to remove any prisoners from the country. But it's hard to see why that stipulation would apply to Daqduq, who is not an Iraqi citizen.
It's almost 2012, thankfully.
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