Yemen

If Guantanamo were really one of al Qaeda’s principal recruiting tools, as President Obama and members of his administration have repeatedly claimed, then the facility would probably be referenced regularly in the terror group’s propaganda. It is not. Instead, other themes dominate Osama bin Laden’s and Ayman al Zawahiri’s messaging.

The Wall Street Journal reports that "President Ali Abdullah Saleh has backed away from a deal struck over the weekend that would have him step down from power immediately but keep his relatives in charge of the country's elite counter-terrorism forces."

Nowhere has the Obama administration been more reluctant to embrace the revolutions sweeping through the Middle East than in Yemen. This is, in part, understandable.

Another leader of an Arab nation seems to be on his way out. This time, it looks like it will be Yemen's leader, Ali Abdullah Saleh. Saleh is currently trying to negotiate his departure with opposition forces. The New York Times reports:

Wisconsin Fleebaggers give up

"We don’t have parties, we don’t have a constitution, we don’t have political organizations, we don’t have an effective civil society. We have to create a completely new state and we have to do it in the middle of a war and revolution.”

Via Sam Stein at the Huffington Post (“Obama Administration Pushes Back On Report That Gitmo Recidivism Has ‘Soared’”), an anonymous Obama administration official has offered a reply (of sorts) to my piece on the DNI’s latest assessment of Guantanamo recidivism.

“Don’t consult with anyone in fighting the Americans; fighting the devil doesn’t require consultation or prayers or seeking divine guidance.”

So said Anwar al Awlaki in a video released online on Monday. Awlaki is, of course, the notorious al Qaeda cleric who openly claims Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan (aka the Fort Hood shooter) and Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab (who tried to blow up Flight 253 on Christmas Day 2009) as his “students.”

In the past couple of days we’ve learned more about the intelligence that allowed Western authorities to neutralize the threat posed by two bombs shipped from Yemen via cargo plane.

We are still learning the details of the terrorist plot to send explosives into the U.S. from Yemen via cargo plane, so it is too early to make a definitive assessment. However, we have enough information to make some preliminary observations and ask some fundamental questions.

Liz Cheney's appearance on Fox News earlier today:

Legal activist groups filed an extraordinary lawsuit yesterday to prevent the U.S. military and CIA from undertaking the "targeted killing" of persons suspected of posing a terrorist threat to the U.S.

President Obama’s Gitmo problem (that is, his inability to shut the facility down, even though he wanted to do so in just one year) is in many ways a Yemen problem. The Yemeni detainees accounted for roughly 40 percent of the Gitmo population when Obama took office.