Last week Mohammed al-Qahtani was released from the Guantanamo Bay naval base and sent back to his native Saudi Arabia, after prosecutors decided not to pursue charges against him. Qahtani is thought to have planned to join the team of terrorists that hijacked flight 93 on September 11, 2001; he was prevented from entering the U.S. by an astute immigration official. Examining the complexities of the legal case against Qahtani, Andrew C. McCarthy concludes that “the decision that he should not, and probably could not, be charged was not lightly made and was amply supported.” McCarthy then turns to broader questions about America’s war on al-Qaeda:

There are still over three dozen jihadists detained at Gitmo. They are still being held at this point only because there are well-founded concerns that they could return to anti-American terrorist activities if released. Half of them are nationals of countries, such as Yemen and Somalia, that are so unstable that it would be irrational to believe repatriated jihadists would be effectively monitored. At least seven remaining detainees will never be charged, and the way the highly erratic military commissions have gone, who knows how many of those who have been charged will ever actually be prosecuted to conclusion? And what happens to any jihadists who end up being acquitted—do we just let them go?

Qahtani’s repatriation returns tough questions to the fore: is the war over? If it is, what are we going to do about detainees who cannot be tried? And if it isn’t, when are we going to address outdated congressional authorizations of the use of military force so that the government’s power to wage war is tailored to the war as it currently exists? We need answers. It’s been over twenty years, and these questions are not going away.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.