An air raid in Yemen Thursday morning is believed to have taken out thirty al Qaeda, including some pretty big fish. Among the latter were the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Nasser al-Wahayshi, his No. 2, Saeed al-Shehri, and Anwar al-Awlaki (although there's some doubt about this last one).
Awlaki is the man whom Hasan Nidal, the Fort Hood shooter, had emailed asking for guidance on whether it was permissible under Islamic law to kill American soldiers.
Awlaki said the query was a year before the Fort Hood shooting, making him "astonished. Where was American intelligence that claimed once that it can read any car plate number anywhere in the world?"
Well, perhaps Thursday morning he received his answer.
Saeed al-Shehri was a prisoner at Gitmo who was released by the Bush administration in 2007 and underwent jihadi rehab in Saudi Arabia, a kind of 12 step program designed to detoxify jihadis. After graduating from the program he promptly popped up in Yemen where he was planning the murders of more Americans. So much for the Saudis' rehabilitation program.
It's not very comforting to know that President Obama plans to release a hundred more detainees as soon as he can find a place to send them. On the other hand, maybe it's a bit like releasing caged game birds. As soon as they fly free into the open air they get blown to smithereens by the shotguns of the waiting sportsmen.
I suspect that a lot of detainees, reflecting on the fate of their brother al-Shehri, might decide that they're perfectly happy to remain in the comfy confines of perhaps the most commodious prison facility in the world rather than risk having their body parts strewn across the desert by a hellfire missile.
In any event, innocent people are a little bit safer today than they were a few days ago if these psychopaths really have been eliminated. It's perhaps the most effective method of jihadi rehab on offer.
RLC
