By John F. Di Leo -
At the time of his death, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been an active jihadist for about thirty years. He had been the supreme commander of what is now known as ISIS for almost ten years, when, on October 26, while fleeing a US Special Forces raid at his latest hiding place in Syria, he committed suicide to avoid being captured alive (taking a couple of his own wives and children with him in the explosion).
President Trump announced the successful termination of this enemy commander on Sunday morning, and because he teased it in advance by Twitter, and announced it so publicly, the mainstream media could not help but report it.
What the media has managed to keep quiet about, however, is something else rather important – and relevant – concerning sl-Baghdadi’s history:
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was captured in about 2003, and spent several years in American-affiliated or American controlled Iraqi prisons (such as Abu Graib). While records are spotty on a lot of capture dates (it was a very hot war in 2003-2004, after all), this much is certain: after at least five years safely out of circulation, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was set free.
And he wasn’t alone.
Throughout the entire War on Terror, a constant irritant for the anti-war Left has been the fact that we kept prisoners of war – on an open-ended basis – without normal American-style trials.
There’s nothing unusual about the practice, as it’s been the norm throughout history that POWs remain in a holding pattern for the duration of the conflict. In fact, historically, the cost of providing for a growing population of enemy POWs, combined with concern for your own side’s POWs held by the enemy, has often been a helpful argument for finding a peace.
Unfortunately, the American Left has seized on a peculiar idea: that everyone in the world deserves the same, full legal protections that American citizens have when arrested – and the Left won't let this idea go.
Yes, even though the Constitution is a contract between the American people and their government, so by definition it can’t be considered binding (except by example) on our government’s relations with foreigners!
So it is that the modern Left demands that anyone captured, from illegal aliens at our border to enemy combatants on the battlefield, must be given speedy trials and all the defendant-weighted advantages that a US citizen enjoys.
It’s outrageous that anyone would propose such a thing to terrorists who don’t even qualify for the protections of the Geneva Convention, but that’s exactly the position of the modern Democratic Party.
Therefore, when Barack Hussein Obama was elected President in 2008, one of his administration’s first acts was to start finding excuses to turn terrorists loose.
The reasons why are open to debate. Some on the Left believe that anyone can be rehabilitated. Some on the Left don’t believe prisons are themselves a moral concept. Some don’t believe we have a right to interfere with foreign countries.
The reasons may even have varied across President Obama’s own cabinet, but for whatever reason, they agreed on the end result. And so the Obama Administration started in on this leftist view of both foreign policy and criminal justice, and started installing metaphorical revolving doors on our POW camps in the middle east.
During Obama’s rapid drawdown from Iraq following our successful GW Bush era surge, the Obama administration quite consciously set thousands of known terrorists free in 2009, to repopulate the Jihadist community across the Middle East.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was among the thousands of homicidal maniacs that Barack Obama unleashed upon our troops, our allies, and the civilian populations of that poor region in 2009, a year of so much unnecessary destruction, both at home and abroad.
Al-Baghdadi should have been executed long ago. He was known to be a jihadi leader, with plenty of mass murders to his credit before we picked him up. He vaulted to the top of our most wanted lists almost as soon as he was set free, becoming a senior leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq in 2010 and soon migrating the group into the name we know it by today. He was formally declared caliph of ISIS in 2014.
In these capacities, just since being irresponsibly set free, he has directed countless killings and other abuses, from tossing homosexuals off rooftops to burning families alive, from designating captured aid workers and nurses as sex slaves to the genocide of the Yazidis, from bringing back crucifixions and stonings to more standard islamofascist methods like drownings, shootings and beheadings.
Such a man would never be considered a candidate for rehabilitation in any sane administration, or in any sane criminal justice system. But he was able to spend 10 years committing mass murder, five of them as the head of one of America’s biggest enemy forces, all because of Barack Obama and the modern Democratic party’s warped worldview.
The modern Left has no problem setting rules in place that restrict the freedom of law-abiding citizens, but they’ve put planks in their campaign position papers and stump speeches, declaring that the government has a moral responsibility to be every bit as generous to guilty criminals and enemy combatants as to decent people.
An aside worth noting: Just as this is now Democrat Party policy in wartime, they have the same policy at home. Their 2020 presidential candidates almost all mimic – if not exceed – the utterly destructive prison-emptying policies at home that Hillary Clinton ran on in 2016.
Thank Heaven for the success of the operation of October 26… and thank Heaven that this villain and many of his associates have at last assumed room temperature, and no longer pose a danger to the innocent people of the middle east.
But we need to learn a key lesson from this case: that it was a conscious choice by the Obama administration that this man, and his thousands of comrades, be set free during his two terms in power. The Obama administration was under no illusion that these were good people; they knew full well they were releasing thousands of bloodthirsty jihadists who had been caught on the battlefield and had no intention of “going straight.”
But for a variety of political and ideological reasons, they set them loose anyway.
The thousands of tortures, rapes, floggings, and murders that al-Baghdadi and his minions have committed since 2009 should be on the conscience of anyone who supported the Obama administration, especially those who supported him for reelection in 2012, when the destructiveness of his policies could no longer be denied.
Let us pray that there is some silver lining, as awareness of this history can help inoculate American voters from making such a mistake again, in 2020 and beyond.
Copyright 2019 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based transportation manager, writer and actor. A former president of Chicago’s Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and onetime chairman of the Milwaukee County Republicans in the 1990s, his column has run in Illinois Review for the past ten years.
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