I’d be shocked if they didn’t.
Via Daily Beast:
President Obama and his national security Cabinet expressed confidence this week in a still-secret agreement with the kingdom of Qatar to keep watch over the five senior Taliban figures released from Guantanamo Bay prison in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.
But privately, many U.S. military and intelligence officials say it’s unwise to rely on Qatar to monitor the Gitmo 5. U.S. officials have had long-standing concerns that Qatar has often turned a blind eye to terrorist financing inside its borders and failed to keep track of a former Guantanamo inmate who was transferred to the emirate at the end of the Bush administration. “We know that many wealthy individuals in Qatar are raising money for jihadists in Syria every day,” a senior U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast. “We also know that we have sent detainees to them before, and their security services have magically lost track of them.”
As the deal is publicly described, Qatar will monitor the former detainees in a loose form of house arrest for a year, after which time they will be free to leave the small Gulf kingdom.
U.S. intelligence officials, however, tell The Daily Beast that the deal also would allow the U.S. government to monitor the senior Taliban figures, but the exact terms of that monitoring would have to be approved by Qatar’s intelligence and security agency, known as Qatar State Security.
As The Daily Beast reported earlier this week, the promises of Qatar’s young emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, were a factor in swaying James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, to lift his objections to releasing the five Guantanamo inmates.
But Qatar’s track record is troubling. In 2008, when the Bush administration transferred Jaralla al-Marri, a Qatari citizen who spent six years in U.S. captivity, from Guantanamo to Qatar, Doha provided similar assurances to the ones it has provided about the Gitmo 5.
But less than six months after the July 2008 transfer, al-Marri traveled to the United Kingdom ostensibly to go on a speaking tour with other former Guantanamo detainees. In a February 26, 2009, cable from the U.S. Embassy in Doha, the State Department complained that Qatar was not living up to its promises.