IBD: President Committed a Felony in Freeing Five Terrorist Leaders

By Investor's Business Daily

National Security: Federal law prohibits any person — repeat, any person — from providing material assistance to terrorists, including human assets. But that's what the president did in releasing five Taliban commanders.

When iconic interviewer David Frost asked former President Nixon about the legality of his actions in the Watergate affair, Nixon said "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."

That's an attitude seemingly shared by the current occupant of the Oval Office.

As former congressman and Afghanistan veteran Allen West points out, President Obama signed into law only months ago the National Defense Authorization Act, which makes it a crime to offer or provide any material support to terrorist groups. It makes no exception as to who and under which circumstances.

The Taliban is considered a non-state terrorist group to which Obama has returned five of the worst terrorists held at Guantanamo. They are not foot soldiers and this exchange was not at the end of a war, when prisoner swaps often happen. They are four-star general equivalents who will return to the battlefield to target and kill Americans again. If that's not material assistance, what is?

"Is there the possibility of some of them trying to return to activities that are detrimental to us? Absolutely," Obama said during a news conference in Poland.

But fear not, he said, because "we will be keeping eyes on them." Oh, good, we can always risk more American lives on top of those already lost capturing them the first time.

"This is aiding and abetting the enemy, which goes along with the collusion of this administration with Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations and supplying weapons and arms to Islamists," West wrote in the Washington Post.

Qatar, where the terrorists are supposed to spend a year working on their tan, has backed the Muslim Brotherhood movement that is banned in most Gulf states.

"We have a federal statute which makes it a felony to provide material assistance to any terrorist organization," said Fox News judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano in support of West's opinion. "It could be money, maps, professional services, any asset whatsoever, include human assets."

The likelihood that the five terrorists will rejoin the campaign against the U.S. constitutes material support, Napolitano argues. We agree. The Taliban is not an organization you retire from. Abandon jihad and your life is forfeited. Taliban terrorists are unlikely to switch careers and become lawyers or plumbers.

"The president must have been determined to bring (POW Bowe) Bergdahl home at all costs, because the manner of his doing so makes it likely that he violated federal criminal law in the deal he cut with Bergdahl's captors," Napolitano writes in the Washington Times.

Andrew McCarthy, the former federal prosecutor who brought the evidence that convicted the perpetrators of the first Islamic terrorist bombing of New York's World Trade Center, believes Obama broke the law against supporting terrorism. Transferring the five terrorists to Qatar in exchange for the release of Bergdahl "violates the law against material support to terrorism," McCarthy told the the Daily Mail of London.

McCarthy wrote in National Review that federal law "bars giving support — including providing personnel, as Obama has done here — not only to formally designated terrorist organizations but to groups known to engage in terrorist activity, whether the State Department gets around to designating them or not."

Obama has boasted he is the one that got Osama bin Laden. Well, we just released five bin Ladens, giving aid and comfort to a terrorist.

Read more at Investor's Business Daily