Hard to figure

Virtually everything this administration does is mystifyingly stupid, but this one really takes the cake:

...Tabarak served as a bodyguard for the al Qaeda leader, worked on his farm in Sudan and helped run a gemstone smuggling racket in Afghanistan, court records here show.During the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, when al Qaeda leaders were pinned down by U.S. forces, Tabarak sacrificed himself to engineer their escape. He headed toward the Pakistani border while making calls on Osama bin Laden's satellite phone as bin Laden and the others fled in the other direction...

Tabarak was captured and taken to the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was classified as such a high-value prisoner that the Pentagon repeatedly denied requests by the International Committee of the Red Cross to see him. Then, after spending almost three years at the base, he was suddenly released.

Today, the al Qaeda loyalist known locally as the "emir" of Guantanamo walks the streets of his old neighborhood near Casablanca, more or less a free man. In a decision that neither the Pentagon nor Moroccan officials will explain publicly, Tabarak was transferred to Morocco in August 2004 and released from police custody four months later.

The claim is that this guy was one of Osama's most loyal body guards. It's hard to conjur up any plausible reason why they would just let him go. Maybe that's what we'll do with Osama if we ever catch him. Or maybe we already have.

I know this sounds a bit shrill, but is it possible we deliberately let Osama escape so that Bush could have a continuing threat to scare Americans about? It's certainly Rove-like.