One big problem has come up for Democrats with the Christmas Day bombing. What is going to happen to the terrorists at Gitmo now? The White House is currently planning to send 95 jihadists being held at Gitmo to Yemen… the same country which has seen two attempted terror attacks planned by Al Qaeda’s base there.

Growing evidence that the Nigerian man charged with trying to blow up a commercial airliner as it landed in Detroit Friday spent time in Yemen and may have been fitted with customized, explosive-laden clothing there could complicate the U.S. government’s efforts to send home more than 80 Yemeni prisoners currently at Guantanamo Bay.

Since Yemenis represent almost half of the roughly 200 remaining prisoners at Gitmo, new hurdles to their resettlement could spell more trouble for President Barack Obama’s plan to close the island prison while transferring a limited number of detainees to a prison in the U.S. Six Yemeni nationals were returned home earlier this month, and officials hoped more transfers would follow.

… “Yesterday just highlights the fact that sending this many people back—or any people back—to Yemen right now is a really bad idea,” said Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. “It’s just dumb….If you made a list of what the three dumbest countries would be to send people back to, Yemen would be on all the lists.”

“I think it’s a major mistake,” Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said about prisoner releases to Yemen. “I don’t think Guantanamo should be closed, but if we’re going to close it I don’t believe we should be sending people to Yemen where prisoners have managed to escape in the past….Obviously, if [Abdulmutallab] did get training and direction from Yemen, it just adds to what is already a dangerous situation.”

… “In terms of sending more of them to return to Yemen, it would be a bit of a reach,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) told POLITICO on Saturday. “I’d, at a minimum, say that whatever we were about to do we’d at least have to scrub it again from top to bottom.”

Thompson, who said he plans to convene hearings in January about the bombing attempt, said the reported Yemen links to the incident could even lead some members to question whether Yemenis at Guantanamo should be transferred to the new terror prison the administration wants to set up in Thomson, Ill. “It’s something that’s going to be of interest to everybody…We ought to look at everything we have underway to make sure that something hasn’t been overlooked,” the congressman said.

Gee, you think?? As it is, this incident should be making Democrats re-think closing Gitmo at all. But Obama promised his liberals that he would, and so he’s going to close that dang thing to pacify them, no matter how much it may endanger the country. But if he is going to keep up his plans to close it, sending the terrorists to Yemen is a horrible idea. Yemen is a hotspot for Al Qaeda and terrorism. The government in Yemen is completely unstable. Obama might as well just send the terrorists back onto the battlefield. As Ed Morrissey points out, this has had disastrous consequences before. Saeed al-Shehri was a former Gitmo detainee returned to Yemen by the Bush administration. He then became a leader in Al Qaeda’s base in Yemen. He was eventually killed in a raid, but that’s really irrelevant. Do we want to send 95 more jihadists to Yemen?

The other alternative is apparently just to send them to the new prison in Illinois. But Americans are already wary about sending the terrorists right into the middle of middle America. The Christmas Day bombing is surely not going to make them feel any more safe. Believe it or not, keeping the United States safe is more important than making everyone else in the world like us. There’s a reason why we keep the terrorists at Gitmo, but Obama just can’t seem to get it through his thick head, no matter how many signs he’s given that closing it is a bad idea.

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