Less than two weeks to go in his lame-duck presidency before Trump takes office, and President Biden is pursuing the controversial move of emptying out Gitmo further. On Monday the Pentagon confirmed it released 11 Yemeni detainees with suspected ties to al Qaeda from the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, after which they are set to begin new lives in Oman, as we detailed earlier. This has shrunk the population of the facility to 15 men.

None of the detainees have ever been charged with a crime, despite having been in the high-secure military facility for a couple decades or more. The Biden administration has long sought to move forward Obama's stated goal of seeking to permanently shutdown the notorious facility where torture has been alleged and documented.

On Tuesday another major potential released has been revealed: the White House is now negotiating with the Taliban which could end in the release of a high-profile prisoner long alleged to have been a close Osama bin Laden associate. Muhammad Rahim al Afghani has long been deemed "the Last Afghan in Guantanamo".

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Democratic administration "has been discussing a deal with the Taliban since at least July, told the group on Nov. 14 that the U.S. would release Muhammad Rahim al Afghani, who the U.S. government alleges was a senior al Qaeda aide, if the Afghan rulers released George Glezmann, Ryan Corbett and Mahmoud Habibi, American citizens seized in Afghanistan in 2022."

Rahim, if the swap goes through, could be freed alongside two others prisoners the Taliban is seeking in exchange for Americans Glezmann and Corbett. However, things are already complicated as the Taliban denies that it is holding Habibi.

The potential deal has apparently been in the works for several weeks at this point, given national security adviser Jake Sullivan briefed House Foreign Affairs Committee members in a classified session on Dec.17. The WSJ has cited him as saying that no decision has yet been made.

If Biden goes through with it, he'll be hammered by Trump and Republicans, and it will also revive criticisms of the botched Afghan withdrawal which ended in the deaths of many American troops as well as Afghan civilians:

The Taliban’s offer poses a dilemma for Biden. He has prided himself on securing the release of American hostages around the world, bringing home more than 70 people over the past four years. But handing over Rahim, long seen by the U.S. government as a high-profile prisoner, and potentially other Afghan prisoners held in U.S. custody might spark criticism.

But at the same time, Gitmo seems to belong to another era—the 'Global War on Terror/GWOT' Bush era of CIA black sites, extraordinary rendition, and the ability of military prosecutors to lock people up for decades without so much as a formal charge.

Ironically the terror situation globally is arguably far worse than it was when Rahim and other AQ operatives were initially apprehended on central Asian battlefields and locked up, thanks to Washington itself.

In 2015 the CIA directly helped a coalition of jihadists which make the Gitmo guys look like 'moderates' take Idlib province from Assad. These same NATO/Gulf-backed Idlib terrorists now hold all of Syria in the wake of Assad's overthrow, and the Biden administration has positively celebrated it.

The real scandal...

The U.S. State Dept.’s own numbers: read the full report HERE at STATE.GOV

Yet Fox-style conservatives are now going to boil with rage over Biden "selling out America" by freeing Gitmo prisoners, but all the while the same 'Fox-Cons' will barely bat an eye over the ISIS-style terrorists now controlling Damascus. The mainstay of the Republican party has also been completely silent over America having armed Sunni hardline jihadists from Libya to Syria for more than the past decade, more content to make a national scandal over who gets released from Gitmo - all the while also dutifully ignoring the obvious Saudi state connections to 9/11.

And then there's also the fact that the jihadists of central Asia, including the Taliban itself, were trained and supported by the CIA and allied intelligence services throughout the 1980s as part of the Afghan-Soviet war. The US deep state doesn't like when average Americans actually dig in to history, where they discover that there are few terrorists or foreign dictators that Washington didn't initially create or at least support at some point.