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November 14, 2005
US Arrested, And Released, Iraqi With Same Name As Amman Bomber
Not confirmed yet if it's the same guy, though:
.S. forces detained and later released an Iraqi with a name that matched one of three suicide bombers who struck Amman hotels, killing 57 others, the U.S. military said Monday.
Jordanian authorities said Safaa Mohammed Ali, 23, was part of the al-Qaida in Iraq squad that bombed the Grand Hyatt, Radisson SAD and Day's Inn hotels on Wednesday.
In Baghdad, the U.S. command said a man by that name was detained by U.S. forces in November 2004 during the American assault on the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah. The Americans said they did not know if the man they detained was the same Safaa Mohammed Ali identified by the Jordanians as one of the bombers.
"He was detained locally at the division detention facility" but was released two weeks later because there was no "compelling evidence to continue to hold him" as a "threat to the security of Iraq."
The U.S. detention of thousands of Iraqis has been cited especially by members of the Sunni Muslim minority that fuels the insurgency as a major motivation for the continuing campaign of violence.
Yes, by all means, let's release all of these guys if we cannot, in the midst of a war, prove their crimes or continuing danger before a federal jury.
I mean, that's what we did in WWII, right? After we'd captured tens of thousands of German troops, we let them go a few weeks later, because we could not prove them guilty of crimes and we could also not prove they'd immediately reconstitute with the Wehrmacht after release.
And here come the conspiracy theories. just when Bush has his lowest approval rate of his service, and shortly after the 12 months of Fitzmas, a man we "detained" and then "released for want of evidence" "just so happens" to show up in Amman and "blow up a wedding."
Just as Bush is claiming that "terrorists" intend to kill us, Europeans, Jews, and not-sufficiently-Islamist Muslims, this "surprise attack" comes to suggest that he's "right." * I question the timing.
* Overuse of scare quotes designed to emulate the paranoid schizophrenic school of political discourse.