BIBLE PROPHECY TRACKER

Investors Business Daily Op-Ed: “As al-Qaida threatens to blow up U.S. planes and the U.S. Open in New York, the president is cutting loose hardcore al-Qaida terrorists from Gitmo through a secretive parole board.

Set up under a little-known executive order, the Periodic Review Board has already cleared for release detainees who were classified “continuing significant threats” and unreleasable. It maintains that they’re no longer dangerous because they’ve taken up yoga and want go home and be “milk and honey” farmers. It actually finds their stories “credible.”

Osama bin Laden’s ex-bodyguards are among the al-Qaida operatives with their bags packed and ready to go.

And now, defense lawyers are using Obama’s recent release of five top Taliban commanders as legal precedent for releasing even more dangerous al-Qaida detainees. As one lawyer boasted, the parole board, whose members include State and Justice department officials, is “predisposed” to their approval.

According to declassified documents, the board is considering repatriating, for example, al-Qaida assassin Muhammad Murdi Issa al-Zahrani to Saudi Arabia, where he’ll no doubt rejoin the jihad against the U.S. with other repatriated Saudi terrorists.

“During his time in Afghanistan,” the intelligence dossier on al-Zahrani warns, he “almost certainly cultivated direct relationships with numerous terrorists leaders who could provide him avenues to re-engage.”

Freeing him would be nuts. Only last month, his government-appointed rep argued, somewhat reasonably, that he no longer meets the threshold for a high-risk detainee. That’s because Obama lowered the bar for what’s considered high-risk when he agreed in May to repatriate the Taliban Five to Qatar, which he entrusted with “appropriate security measures.”

“We have demonstrated that Mr. Al-Zahrani represents a lower threat than the (Taliban) detainees that have been released,” his defense team wrote the board, “and therefore does not rise to the standard for ‘continuing significant threat’” to U.S. security.

When the commander in chief vouched that national security “would not be compromised” by the release of Taliban leaders, he created a legal loophole through which some 40 remaining, uncharged Gitmo detainees too dangerous to release can wiggle.

Obama had to have known that he was creating a new precedent for release. And now his hand-picked parole board is suddenly taking a new look at these cases.

If Obama thinks that emptying Gitmo of al-Qaida is the way to end the war on terror, he’s sadly mistaken. He’s only restarting it.