http://nhregister.com/articles/2009/01/29/news/a5-gitmo.txt
Before he was released from Guantanamo, a Saudi detainee insisted he had only wanted to help refugees and was not a fighter. Now, as an al-Qaida field commander sporting a bandolier of bullets, he is threatening the United States and has been hailed by a militant Web site as a veteran guerrilla and "a fomenter of war."
The story of Abu al-Hareth Muhammad al-Oufi underscores the dilemma Barack Obama's administration finds itself in: Keeping men locked up without trials invites global criticism, but releasing them without a fair and diligent process to distinguish enemies from noncombatants exposes the U.S. and its allies to danger. It also shows how hard it is to separate truth from lies.
Al-Oufi was one of two former Saudi detainees at Guantanamo, the U.S. military prison in Cuba, who resurfaced last week in video clips as al-Qaida fighters in Yemen. Their identities were confirmed in recent days by a U.S. counterterror official. Al-Oufi was detainee number 333 at Guantanamo.
On Wednesday, the SITE Intelligence Group, an organization that monitors extremist Web sites, provided a translation of al-Oufi's biography written in an online militant forum. The personal history was completely at odds with how al-Oufi had characterized himself as he tried to convince a panel of U.S. military officers at Guantanamo that he was an innocent man who had been swept up in Pakistan after the Sept. 11 attacks.
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