In what constitutes a staggering blow to President Obama’s goal of shuttering the Guantanamo Bay military detention facility, a new report by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) says one in five former detainees have returned to militant activity following their release.

But as with each successive challenge to the Obama White House, when all else invariably fails, the President and his aides blame the former administration with graduating intensity. Defense-related issues–on which the President and his party are, largely, observed as out of their depth–are of course no exception to Obama’s petty politics of blame.

A senior White House official Thursday told The Washington Post’s Greg Sergeant that those terrorist recidivists cited in the Pentagon’s study were conveniently, and necessarily by virtue of Obama’s perfection, released during the Bush administration.

“Because the Obama administration has a better screening process in place to determine which detainees pose a threat,” Sergeant writes, the Obama aide was confident no detainees released under President Obama’s watch have resumed extremist activity.

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Seen as a prelude to the White House honoring President Barack Obama’s pledge to shutter the controversial detention facility by January 22, Administration officials last week quietly repatriated twelve Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Among those released were six Yemenis, four Afghanis, and two Somalis, many of whom have been in American custody for the last eight years.

The decision to close Guantanamo–by transferring and trying in civilian court or repatriating detainees–was hailed by Democrats as the first and ultimately necessary step in dismantling the Bush-era detention policies, but has since been met with increasing public skepticism and softening support, with polls finding Americans opposing the closure by more than a 2-to-1 margin.

And with reports now confirming that two Gitmo prisoners were released into the custody of a failed state whose legitimacy the United Nations and our State Department refuse to acknowledge, this sense of apprehension promises to grow deeper still.

The two Somalis, Mohammed Sulaymon Barre and Ismael Arela, were entrusted into the custody of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) by Justice Department officials. A former British protectorate known locally as Somaliland received the pair and, according to local press accounts, immediately freed the former terror suspects.

At the time of his arrest in 2006, the Department of Defense identified Arela as a “courier between East Africa Al Qaeda (EEAQ) and Al Qaeda in Pakistan,” additionally maintaining he held a leadership role in an EEAQ-affiliated group known as the Somali Council of Islamic Courts. Arela was suspected of acquiring weapons and explosives and facilitating the entry of Al Qaeda members into Somalia by way of forging government documents.

Arela’s compatriot was suspected of supporting “forces engaged in hostilities against the United States” while operating an illegal money transfer operation from his home in Pakistan. A member of the Osama Bin Laden-linked al Wafa, a terrorist organization found on the State Department’s dubious Terrorist Exclusion List, and participant in a jihadist training camp in Afghanistan, Barre was found deserving of continued detention in 2005.

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