SHOCKED, SHOCKED, TO FIND THIS OUT – AT 6:45 P.M. ET:  Detainees released from Guantanamo seem to be going back to their old specialty, as Fox News reports:

Prior to his release in December, Abdul Hafiz was Prisoner Number 1030 at Guantanamo Bay. Now, less than four months later, he's back home in Afghanistan and working for the Taliban -- just the latest of more than 100 released detainees who have returned to terrorism, according to the Pentagon.

Hafiz, suspected in the March 2003 kidnapping and murder of an International Red Cross worker, was the "Taliban head of all Madrassas ... responsible for recruiting and sending young men to fight for the Taliban," according to U.S. government memos. He was said to have maintained contacts for Mullah Mohammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban of Afghanistan, and to have admitted to participating in jihad against the Soviets.

But despite the list of charges against him, the U.S. government transferred Hafiz to his home country in December. And now, a senior U.S. official tells Fox News, he is back on the battlefield. According to a published report, Hafiz has been appointed by Mullah Omar to oversee ransom demands for kidnapping victims and to coordinate with nongovernment-aid organizations operating in the Taliban's areas of influence.

COMMENT:  Can you imagine if, during World War II, we released Nazi prisoners to go back and fight for the Fatherland?  Or even the small number of Japanese prisoners we captured?  (The Japanese did not readily surrender.)

That makes Hafiz just the latest addition to an increasingly long list of former Guantanamo detainees suspected to have returned to terror. The Pentagon, in an estimate issued in January, now believes that roughly 20 percent of the 560 detainees who were released from Guantanamo are back on the terror front lines.

American troops will die because the United States is releasing enemy combatants.  It is madness, utter madness, and yet it continues.

March 29, 2010