Glimpse into Obama’s Approach to the GWOT

“The separate strikes on two compounds, coming three hours apart and involving five missiles fired from Afghanistan-based Predator drone aircraft, were the first high-profile hostile military actions taken under Obama’s four-day-old presidency. A Pakistani security official said in Islamabad that the strikes appeared to have killed at least 10 insurgents, including five foreign nationals and possibly even “a high-value target” such as a senior al-Qaeda or Taliban official.”

The Post provides some deniability cover for Obama stating that it was unclear whether he personally authorized the attacks, given he’s just 4 days into his Presidency. But I distinctly remember after the election that news services reported that immediately after the elections, the President-elect starts getting daily national security briefings to help with the transition. So I can’t help but conclude that Obama could have stopped these attacks if he wanted to.

But he didn’t.

If there was any concern about the legal status of the people that were bombed, whether they were “enemy combatants” under international law or some other legal classification, it doesn’t seemed to have stopped Obama from continuing this skirmish in the Global War on Terror. If there was any hand-wringing over the writ of habeus corpus for the people being bombed, it doesn’t appear to have been enough for Obama to say, “Hey, wait a minute…..”

I wonder how this bodes for the Gitmo detainees?  On January 23rd, there was an AP news story (I saw it here on Yahoo), that reported:

A Saudi man released from Guantanamo after spending nearly six years inside the U.S. prison camp is now the No. 2 of Yemen’s al-Qaida branch, according to a purported Internet statement from the terror network.

Maybe that’s the overall strategy. Close Gitmo and avoid the legal wrangling and hand-wringing, let the detainees resume their duties in al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban and then re-engage them on the field of battle, attacking them with missles fired from drone airplanes so that there’s no chance of them being detained again.