"Make a Schwarma Sandwich" Out of His Interrogator

A delegation of U.S. Senators, led by Senator John McCain, is in Yemen today to reportedly discuss the Yemeni citizens detained at Gitmo, among other topics. When it comes to closing down the detention facility, the Yemeni detainees pose one of the Obama administration's most difficult challenges. As Steve Hayes and I have previously reported, this is true for primarily two reasons.

First, there is substantial turmoil inside Yemen, which is now home to one of the strongest al Qaeda affiliates on the planet and is governed by President Saleh's corrupt and duplicitous government. Second, many of the Yemeni detainees at Gitmo are first-order threats who have been indoctrinated to wage jihad until they have either achieved victory over the "infidels" or died trying.

For these reasons, and more, the Obama administration has, like the Bush administration, been hesitant to repatriate the more than 100 Yemenis left at Gitmo to their home country. There were some initial comments by Obama administration officials suggesting that they wanted to send a "majority" of the Yemenis back home, but the administration eventually backed off this game plan. Instead, the administration tried to send at least some of the Yemenis to Saudi Arabia's rehabilitation program, but these efforts have thus far failed. And there are good reasons to suspect that the Saudi program, which relies on "soft" policing tactics including pressure from the jihadists' families, will not be very effective on the bulk of the Yemeni detainees who have no roots inside the Kingdom. In fact, the more we learn about the Saudi program the more we realize that is has not been nearly as effective as its proponents claim.

Thus, the Obama administration is left with no easy answers. Closing down Gitmo by January of 2010, if the administration sticks to that timeline, will likely mean that the administration will have to find an unsatisfactory compromise.

All the while we should be focused on who the Yemeni detainees are. Consider one glaring illustration.

Sanad Yislam al Kazimi is a Yemeni citizen who was captured in the United Arab Emirates in January 2003. While in the UAE, al Kazimi allegedly plotted attacks against U.S. interests with top al Qaeda operative and USS Cole bombing mastermind, Abd al Rahim al Nashiri. In November 2002, just a few months prior to al Kazimi's capture, al Nashiri was also captured in the UAE. At the time, according to a biography prepared by the Department of Defense, al Nashiri's planning included "a plot to crash a small airplane into the bridge of a Western navy vessel in Port Rashid, UAE" and the bombing of a U.S. housing compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, among other planned attacks.

According to documents prepared by the U.S. government at Gitmo, al Kazimi is an especially violent and blood-thirsty extremist. At some point while in U.S. custody, al Kazimi stated "he would like to tell his friends in Iraq to find his interrogator, slice him up, and make a schwarma sandwich out of him with his head sticking out of the end of the schwarma."

Al Kazimi also boasted that "all Muslims are against the U.S., even Muslims within the U.S." and he could raise $100,000 "in any mosque in the U.S. in 30 minutes using Koran passages, which Muslims could use to fight Americans in any country."

Such statements are not the type of thing that is likely to get a detainee freed. But given the biographical details the U.S. government compiled on al Kazimi, his reported words are not surprising.