Gibbs: Hey, maybe we should stop sending terrorists back to Yemen

Via Breitbart. I’m just kidding with that headline: Transfers have been halted “right now,” he says, but presumably they’ll be okay again in the not-too-distant future. And by “okay,” I of course mean politically okay, not okay from the standpoint of U.S. national security. If you’ve spent any time at all reading about Yemen since the Flight 253 attack, including recent Headline items right here about the coming “explosion” in that country, it’s painfully clear that it will never be safe to transfer jihadis to that country. Ever. It never was safe to transfer them, in fact: Russ Feingold put out a press release today reminding the public of how many times he warned Bush and The One about Yemen since 2002, and yet that didn’t stop either of them from trying to solve their Gitmo problem by shipping people back there anyway — with predictable results. Here’s the latest bit of doomsaying courtesy of the Times of London:

A former World Bank expert on Yemen said, however, that the military conflicts were the least of the country’s problems. After decades of corruption and mismanagement, Yemen is on the brink of an economic meltdown, which would make it vulnerable to an al-Qaeda takeover.

Abdul-Ghani al-Iryani, the nephew of the President’s political adviser and who works as a development consultant, said that an international conference in London this month might be the last chance to save it. As it runs low on resources it is in danger of becoming al-Qaeda’s new front line…

“The drop in oil revenues, the increasing burden of maintaining the network of patronage, the various conflicts here and there, will bankrupt the treasury in about a year,” Mr al-Iryani told The Times. “The World Bank says two or three years but there’s no transparency so it’s difficult to say for sure.

“What will happen is the that central bank will fail to guarantee the exchange rate of the riyal and there will be a run on the banks. The banking system is so fragile it will collapse.”

45 percent of the population is under 15 and their oil economy’s set to run dry by 2017. Sending terrorists back there is like putting a vicious animal in a cage whose bars are already disintegrating. But I’m sure the transfers will resume, for the simple reason that we seem content to repeat this mistake over and over. It’s almost not worth complaining about anymore.

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