The would-be bomber of Delta flight 253, Abdul Farouk Umar Abdulmutallab, appears to have been acting in concert with al Qaeda elements in Yemen. The Obama administration’s plan to close Gitmo hinges on sending some 100 Yemeni terrorists back to their country of origin where they will be “rehabilitated,” but opponents of the Gitmo closure have repeatedly pointed out that there couldn’t be a worse place to send these detainees than Yemen. That case is now bolstered by the fact that the bomb Abdulmutallab detonated, and the plan to detonate it, were both put together in Yemen. It is an inconvenient fact for President Obama, but not the only inconvenient fact to emerge from this incident. How often we have been told to look at the “root causes” of terrorism, or as Obama put it in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks:
But this act of terror wasn’t born of poverty and ignorance. Abdulmutallab, like so many other al Qaeda terrorists, was born into great privilege, the son of the former economics minister of Nigeria who went so far as to warn the American embassy of the risk his radical son might pose. We’ve seen this over and over again. It isn’t the poor and hungry who turn to international terrorism — they’re too busy trying to put food on the table for their families. Unfortunately for President Obama, events are increasingly coming into conflict with his own views on Islamic terrorism and with the policies he has put forward to contain it. One can only hope that he draws the correct lesson from this latest attack and thinks better of sending 100 would-be Abdulmutallabs back to Yemen to rearm and rejoin the jihadist war against America.
