The prisoner population at Guantanamo Bay was shrunk for the umpteenth time this weekend after nine Yemeni nationalists were transferred to Saudi Arabia to begin life anew. USA Today says “it was the first time the royal kingdom agreed to take in non-citizens from Guantanamo.” Just 80 detainees are all who now stand in the way of Barack Obama achieving his goal of shuttering the facility, and a quarter of them have arrangements to be transferred.

Obama has a well-documented history of recklessly freeing Gitmo prisoners, but this one is especially difficult to swallow. “The timing of this latest release is curious considering the recent uproar over the so-called ‘secret 9/11 papers’ which … implicate Saudi officials in the 9/11 terror attacks,” notes Larry O'Connor.

It’s even more chilling when we digest it from a historical perspective. Here’s Fox News analyst Ralph Peters writing in The New York Post:

> Firm figures are elusive, but estimates are that the Saudis fund up to 80% of American mosques, at least in part. And their goal is the same here as it is elsewhere in the world where Islam must compete with other religions: to prevent Muslims from integrating into the host society. … Consider how idiotic we’ve been, allowing Saudis to fund hate mosques and madrassas, to provide Jew-baiting texts and to do their best to bully American Muslims into conformity with their misogynistic, 500-lashes worldview. … Decades ago, the Saudi royal family realized it had a problem. Even its brutal practices weren’t strict enough for its home-grown zealots. So the king and his thousands of princes gave the budding terrorists money — and aimed them outside the kingdom. Osama bin Laden was just one extremist of thousands. The 9/11 hijackers were overwhelmingly Saudi. The roots of the jihadi movements tearing apart the Middle East today all lie deep in Wahhabism.

Some kind of “ally” we’ve got there. O'Connor adds, “The president’s priorities are clear: Empty Gitmo at all costs, even if it means handing terrorists over to a government that may have been complicit in the most devastating terror attacks in American history.” We’ve been duped — and not just by the Saudis.