In reality, however, it is reasonable to propose that Guantánamo is now a permanent institution for a variety of reasons. The first concerns a number of cynical moves by lawmakers in recent months, inserting provisions into a military spending bill that are explicitly designed to keep Guantánamo open — a ban on using funds to transfer Guantánamo prisoners to the U.S. mainland to face trials, a ban on using funds to buy or build a prison on the U.S. mainland to hold Guantánamo prisoners, and a ban on the release of any prisoner cleared for release by the President’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force (composed of representatives of government departments and the intelligence agencies) to countries considered dangerous by lawmakers — including Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.

On all of these challenges to his stated intentions — bringing at least some of the 33 men recommended for trials by the Task Force to the mainland to face federal court trials, holding them in a U.S. prison, and releasing some of the 89 prisoners “approved for transfer” by the Task Force — President Obama could have decided to override Congress. As was reported before Christmas, it was within the bounds of his authority to veto the legislation or to issue a signing statement striking down those parts of the spending bill that he considered to be an unconstitutional infringement of Presidential authority.

In the end, however, demonstrating what many observers now regard as typical cowardice, he chose not to do so. A veto was always out of the question, because it threatened Congressional authorization of billions of dollars to continue the ruinously expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that no one in authority has any wish to end, but a signing statement, declaring the provisions as an unconstitutional infringement of executive power, was a distinct possibly, despite the negative connotations of signing statements after George W. Bush’s excessive use of them during his Presidency. As David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, lawyers who served in the Justice Department under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, explained in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “Congressional efforts to block future trials by imposing spending restrictions on the president are unconstitutional and should be abandoned.”

Nevertheless, despite such trenchant criticism of Congress from Conservative commentators, Obama refused to go as far as Rivkin and Casey, choosing instead to restrict his opposition to some fine sounding, but ultimately toothless grumbling. As the New York Times reported, “He sharply criticized those restrictions, but did not claim that he had the constitutional authority to disregard them,” and, instead, merely said he “would ask Congress to repeal the restrictions, seek to ‘mitigate their effects’ and oppose any attempt to extend or expand them after they expired in September, at the end of the current fiscal year.”

Criticizing the ban on bringing prisoners to the mainland to face trials, Obama defended the prosecution of terrorist suspects in federal court as “a powerful tool in our efforts to protect the nation,” and described the ban imposed by Congress as “a dangerous and unprecedented challenge to critical executive branch authority to determine when and where to prosecute Guantánamo detainees, based on the facts and the circumstances of each case and our national security interests.” As a result of his refusal to overturn the provision, however, the 33 men recommended for trials by the Task Force will, for the most part, remain held without trial.

The administration is reportedly unwilling to proceed with trials by Military Commission, rightfully criticized as a second-tier judicial system by opponents, especially after the unjust and undignified plea deal arranged with former child prisoner Omar Khadr in October, and the main effect of Obama’s capitulation, therefore, is to hand victory to the lawmakers who inserted this provision specifically to prevent the President from proceeding with the federal court trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks This trial was announced by Attorney General Eric Holder last November, but it met with fierce resistance from misguided Republican ideologues who are still sold on the Bush administration’s ruinous and misguided notion that terrorist suspects are warriors and not criminals.

Criticizing the ban on using military funds to release any of the 89 prisoners cleared by the Task Force unless, as the Times described it, defense secretary Robert Gates “certifies that the country has met a strict set of security conditions,” the President stated this process of certification, adding to security concerns already undertaken by the government, would “hinder the conduct of delicate negotiations with foreign countries” and “interfere with the authority of the executive branch to make important and consequential foreign policy and national security determinations regarding whether and under what circumstances such transfers should occur in the context of an ongoing armed conflict.”

On this point, the effect will be less noticeable, as 58 of the 89 men cleared for release by the Task Force have already been held indefinitely without charge or trial for a year because they are Yemenis, and last January, following hysterical overreaction to the news that the failed Christmas Day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had apparently been recruited in Yemen, the President announced a moratorium on releasing any Yemeni prisoners that is still in place, and shows no sign of being lifted. Of the other 31 men, the majority are awaiting third countries prepared to accept them, as they cannot be safely repatriated, because they face the risk of torture, and  the administration, Congress, and the D.C. Circuit Court have all acted to make sure that none of them can be released in the U.S. It is, therefore, unlikely that the Congressional ban will apply to any of these men.

The only prisoners not covered by this ban are those cleared for release after winning their habeas petitions in the District Court in Washington D.C. On this point, however, the President has done nothing but infuriate liberal supporters, when, on Monday, he repatriated an Algerian, Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, against his will. Bin Mohammed had won his habeas petition in November 2009, but was terrified of returning to his home country, where, primarily, he feared being attacked by Islamist militants. On his behalf, the judge in his case, Judge Gladys Kessler, had strived to prevent his forcible repatriation, but had finally been overruled by the Supreme Court, paving the way for his return to Algeria on Monday.

The fact that the only man to be released since last August — and, very possibly, the only man to be released for the foreseeable future — was someone who was desperate not to be returned to his home country is a sad indictment of the position that President Obama has taken on the 9th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, two years after he promised to close the prison, and one year after he failed to do so.

As I have explained above, by refusing to tackle Congress over its unconstitutional intrusions on his authority — and through his moratorium on releasing any Yemenis — he has ensured that there is no practical distinction between the 33 men proposed for trials by the Task Force, and the 89 men cleared for release, because almost all of them have now been consigned to indefinite detention without charge or trial for the foreseeable future.

Completing this picture are 48 other men, explicitly designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial by the Task Force. This has been an unacceptable proposal, ever since it was first signaled by the President in May 2009, as the men in question are regarded as being too dangerous to release, even though the administration concedes that it has no usable evidence to prove these assertions. This, of course, indicates that giving credence to unreliable information derived through torture played a key role in these determinations. The plans are also troubling because they so explicitly perpetuate the position taken by President Bush when he established Guantánamo, and because they give succor to those who want to see indefinite detention without charge or trial used again in future, and on this front it was thoroughly depressing to hear, before Christmas, that Obama was considering issuing an executive order formally approving the indefinite detention of these 48 men, but guaranteeing that they would receive some sort of regular review of their cases.

A decision on this is expected soon, and it should be fiercely resisted by anyone who believes that the malignant experiment at Guantánamo has gone on for far too long, and that holding prisoners is only acceptable when they are either criminal suspects to be put forward for trials, or prisoners of war who can, in any case, be held until the end of hostilities. And if President Obama does go ahead and sign this executive order, it is incumbent on everyone opposed to the ongoing scandal of Guantánamo to point out that, with Congressional interference and Obama’s moratorium, it is not just 48 prisoners who are proposed for indefinite detention without charge or trial, but almost every prisoner still held at Guantánamo — 170 men in total.

High hopes that Guantánamo would be closed by Obama may have been dashed within months of him taking office, but even the most cynical observer would have been hard pressed to say at the time that, after two years, Obama would be presiding over a situation that was so similar to that created by Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in 2002 — where the entire population of the prison is, in effect, arbitrarily detained, held indefinitely without charge or trial, regardless of whether or not the majority of them are supposed to have been freed or put on trial.

As the prison begins its 10th year of operations, this is a deeply depressing state of affairs, and one that anyone concerned with justice for the remaining prisoners should campaign about, complain about, and publicize relentlessly.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

The identity of the second — Mahmoud Salim al-Ali, a Syrian — was then revealed by Der Spiegel, which stated that he had arrived in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate in central-western Germany. In fact, the identities of both men should not have come as a surprise, as Der Spiegel devoted a major article to their stories back in July, after the German government had confirmed that it would take two prisoners from Guantánamo.

The release is good news not only for Ayman al-Shurafa and Mahmoud al-Ali, but also for the many campaigners and commentators — myself included — who have been trying to keep Guantánamo on the mainstream media’s radar. Although President Obama briefly discussed Guantánamo on September 9, in his first press conference since May, apologizing for failing to meet his self-imposed deadline of January 2010 for the prison’s closure, progress towards belatedly fulfilling his promise has been horribly slow this year. Although the President’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force recommended that over half of the remaining prisoners should be released, just 21 of the 111 prisoners cleared for release at the start of the year have been freed in the last nine months, and 90 cleared men still remain.

Dozens of these men — like Mahmoud al-Ali — cannot be repatriated because they face the risk of torture in their home countries, and must wait for third countries to rehouse them (a difficult task, given that the Obama administration, Congress and the judiciary have all made sure that the United States will not take any of them), and one, like Ayman al-Shurafa, is a stateless Palestinian. However, 58 others are Yemenis, who could be sent home tomorrow were it not for an indefensible moratorium on releasing any Yemenis that was issued by President Obama in January, following hysterical overreaction to the news that the failed Christmas day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had been recruited in Yemen.

Clearly, the President has no chance of fulfilling his promise to close Guantánamo until this moratorium is lifted, and those who wish to see the prison closed must do more to challenge this cynical knee-jerk ban which effectively tars all Yemenis as terrorist sympathizers. For now, however, the German government must be congratulated for offering new homes to Ayman al-Shurafa and Mahmoud al-Ali, and for bringing their long and unjust imprisonment to an end.

Ayman al-Shurafa, a stateless Palestinian

Ayman al-Shurafa, who is now 34 years old, was cleared for release by a military review board in 2007, but remained at Guantánamo because of the particular problems facing the handful of Palestinians held in the prison, who are — or were — literally stateless. In al-Shurafa’s case, although his family is from Gaza, his parents settled in Saudi Arabia with their four children when he was a young child. He spent most of his life in Saudi Arabia, where his family still lives, but because he does not have a Saudi passport, the Saudi government refused to press the US authorities for his repatriation. Instead, he holds documents issued by the Jordanian government (as part of his family’s long search for refuge), which are suitable only for travel purposes, and until Germany agreed to accept him, he was, therefore, literally a man without a home.

Around ten years ago, al-Shurafa traveled to Gaza to enroll in a Palestinian university to finish a business degree that he had started in Saudi Arabia. However, after the intifada broke out, he feared for his life and decided that he had to leave. He returned to Saudi Arabia, but, as with all Saudi residents, discovered that his educational opportunities were more limited than those available to Saudi citizens. It was then that, like many other young men, he found himself taking poor advice from a Saudi sheikh who stated that he needed to be “prepared” to defend Muslims from those oppressing them — a religious duty known as e’dad, which is conceptually distinct from jihad or any participation in combat.

As a result, he traveled to Afghanistan in summer 2001, but, like many young men recruited by religious figures, he was unaware that the Taliban’s enemies were other Muslims. Throughout his detention, he maintained that, although he was in Afghanistan, he never took up arms against the Northern Alliance — or against the United States after the US-led invasion of October 2001. In meetings at Guantánamo with his lawyers, he explained that “he hadn’t the faintest idea of what he was getting himself into; he knew nothing about the Taliban’s long inter-Muslim struggle with the Northern Alliance, and had no knowledge whatsoever of al-Qaeda.”

In 2007, a military review board agreed with this assessment, but although al-Shurafa was cleared for release, and was compliant throughout his detention, he still ended up held in isolation in a cell in Camp 6 for 22 to 23 hours a day. Throughout his life, he has suffered from vitiligo, a painful skin complaint, and his permanent isolation from sunlight made his skin condition flare up horribly, causing maddening discomfort, as well as permanent skin damage. According to his lawyers, although he was well regarded by both the guards and by his fellow prisoners, leading prayers in his cell block, he was deeply concerned that he would never see his elderly mother again, and also showed signs of depression, asking the authorities for medication to “let the days go by without feeling anything.”

Mahmoud Salim al-Ali, a Syrian seized by an Afghan warlord

As Der Spiegel explained in July, Mahmoud Salim al-Ali, who is 36 years old, had been living in Kuwait before he made an ill-fated trip to Afghanistan in October 2001. His last job had been in a fruit and vegetable market, but he also had “experience working in the service sector and in industry, as a salesperson in the Sultan Shopping Center and with the Al-Fahad Aluminum & Glass Works.”

However, in late September 2001, he traveled to Afghanistan, via Syria and Iran, apparently because, as the US authorities alleged at Guantánamo, he “had a desire to join the jihad after viewing videos depicting the situation in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya.” Nevertheless, as Der Spiegel also explained:

[H]e never received any military training or saw any combat. After a few days in Kabul, al-Ali contracted a serious case of diarrhea, for which he was treated in a hospital. He then spent the night in the house of a doctor. By the next day, as he was fleeing from the Northern Alliance, which was fighting the Taliban, his big adventure was over. Al-Ali and his companions were captured by an Afghan warlord and robbed. The bandits took his money, his wedding ring and his watch, and he was later turned over to the Americans.

New life in Germany

For both these men, life in Germany promises to present them with an excellent opportunity to rebuild their lives. As Der Spiegel explained in July, Mahmoud al-Ali “has a wife and a 10-year-old daughter living in Syria who apparently want to come to Germany to live with him, to which the state politicians dealing with the case have no objections,” and Ayman al-Shurafa, whose immediate physical and psychological needs appear to be more acute, is already receiving attention in a medical clinic, where, as Der Spiegel reported on Thursday, “he will be given an extensive check-up over the next few days.” Hamburg government officials stated that “the goal was to help reintegrate the former prisoner into society, with the hope that he will ultimately become self-sufficient.”

Accepting these two men has not been without problems for the German authorities. There was fierce opposition from conservative ministers, for example, and, in response, plans for the state of Brandenburg to take a third prisoner, Mohammed Tahamuttan, the last Palestinian in Guantánamo, were quietly dropped. In July, Rainer Speer, the state’s interior minister, told Der Spiegel, “We were up to the task,” and the newspaper also noted that “the Interior Ministry task force charged with the issue had apparently concluded that accepting all three candidates was fundamentally justifiable.” However, Der Spiegel speculated that the rejection of Tahamuttan was “probably intended primarily to send a political message at home in Germany, where de Maizière felt that he had to show the many members of his party who had opposed reaching an agreement with the United States on Guantánamo that he was not blindly obeying the Americans.”

Noticeably, the government in Berlin also refused to proceed with the resettlement of Ayman al-Shurafa and Mahmoud al-Ali without written guarantees from the Obama administration. As Der Spiegel noted, Germany was “probably the only ally to have done so.” According to a joint declaration signed by the two countries, “The United States will not release any inmates if this could jeopardize the security of the United States or our friends and allies.” Der Spiegel added that “the Germans also have it in writing that the US government would not permit any individuals deemed a threat to the national security of the United States to ‘enter the country,’” explaining that what this means is that the men being released and sent to Germany “are not dangerous and could even enter the United States as tourists.”

As Der Spiegel also explained, this was “a delayed victory for Wolfgang Schäuble who, as interior minister in Berlin’s former grand coalition government, refused to accept Guantánamo inmates because, as he noted, they would not even be given a tourist visa for the United States.”

Will other countries now help?

While this will send shockwaves though the more paranoid parts of the US establishment (and should, if there is any justice, lead to calls to revoke the various bans on bringing cleared prisoners to live in the US), the impact of Germany’s acceptance of two prisoners should be most marked in Europe, where hopes for rehousing other cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated are most sharply focused.

Although ten other countries in Europe (Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and Switzerland) have taken in 23 prisoners over the last 16 months, who had no prior connection to their new homes (and 15 others have been settled in Bermuda, Cape Verde, Georgia, Latvia and Palau), other countries have failed to be swayed by the entreaties of Daniel Fried, President Obama’s Special Envoy to Guantánamo.

Ambassador Fried’s thankless task has been to persuade other countries to overlook US hypocrisy regarding the resettlement of prisoners, and to help President Obama close Guantánamo by taking in men like Ayman al-Shurafa and Mahmoud al-Ali. However, despite his success to date, certain prominent countries in western Europe — Austria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK — have so far refused to help, even though, in some cases, persuasive arguments can be made that they should be involved as part of a tacit acknowledgment of their involvement in the crimes committed in the “War on Terror.”

In Norway’s case, this arose because of the involvement of AkerKvaerner, the country’s largest commercial company, which, as filmmaker and journalist Erling Borgen has noted, “had 700 people working on the Guantánamo base,” providing logistical support that included “fueling the rendition flights.” In Sweden’s case, the complicity centers on the government’s involvement, in December 2001, in the CIA-directed kidnap and rendition to torture in Egypt of two Egyptian asylum seekers, Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed Alzery. In Britain’s case, the true scale of the complicity of the Bush administration’s closest ally has not yet been revealed, but enough has been exposed to indicate that providing new homes for a handful of cleared Guantánamo prisoners who cannot be repatriated is the least that the government should do.

The British government’s complicity includes former foreign secretary Jack Straw’s recently-revealed support for Guantánamo and former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s interference in plans to provide consular access to a British citizen seized in Zambia (Martin Mubanga). It also includes involvement in the kidnap and rendition of two British residents in the Gambia (Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil El-Banna), its knowledge of the torture by US agents in Pakistan of British resident Binyam Mohamed, who was later sent to be tortured in Morocco (also with British knowledge), and the repeated visits made by British agents to British nationals and residents while they were held in Pakistan, and in US custody in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, even though it was apparent that the conditions in which they were being held did not meet internationally recognized standards of humane treatment.

Although Prime Minister David Cameron has announced an inquiry into British complicity in torture abroad, one way in which the government could atone for its deep involvement in the “War on Terror” would be to step back from the outrageous position taken by the previous government — that, in securing the return of nine British nationals and five British residents, the UK had “done its bit,” as foreign secretary David Miliband claimed in January 2009 — and accept that this was, in fact, nothing more than what was required.

The new coalition government already faces questions about why it cannot secure the return of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who was cleared for release in 2007 but is still held, and is also under pressure to explain why it will not accept Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian who lived and worked in the UK between 1999 and 2001, who was also cleared for release in 2007, but is terrified of returning to Algeria. Perhaps it might now be worth asking if the British government will take up where Germany left off, and also offer a new home to Mohammed Tahamuttan, the Palestinian who is still waiting for someone to free him from Guantánamo.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation, as “Two Freed Prisoners in Germany.” Cross-posted on The Public Record, Cageprisoners and New Left Project.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 64 prisoners released from February 2009 to July 2010, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland, 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini); July 2010 — 1 Algerian, 1 Syrian to Cape Verde, 1 Uzbek to Latvia, 1 unidentified Afghan to Spain.

With Abdul Aziz Naji now apparently home with his family (also see this interview here), valid concerns still remain about whether he is safe from extremists, about whether the Algerian government can be trusted, and about whether the Obama administration has been sufficiently stung by international criticism to call off its planned repatriation of other Algerians in Guantánamo who fear returning home. These are questions that I discussed in a recent article, and I’d like now to run through the stories of the other men released last week, which, yet again, demonstrate that those who insist on flagging up all the remaining prisoners at Guantánamo as terrorists are either cynical opportunists, preying on the message of permanent fear that was promoted by the Bush administration, or blinkered ideologues, incapable of separating fact from fiction.

Abdul Nasser Khantumani: A 50-year old economic migrant from Syria, resettled in Cape Verde

Abdul Nasser Khantumani (identified on his release as Abd al-Nisr Mohammed Khantumani, and also known in Guantánamo as Abdul Nasir al-Tumani), a 50-year old Syrian, was released at the same time as Abdul Aziz Naji, but, given undisputed fears about what would await him if he was repatriated to Syria, he was, instead, given a new home on the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde, an archipelago of islands off the west coast of Africa.

Well respected as a stable democracy, Cape Verde has a population of 500,000, but only a very small Muslim population, so it will be difficult for him to adjust to his new life, especially as he is alone, with no members of his family or fellow ex-prisoners to provide any support. What is unusual about this arrangement is that his son, Muhammed, who was seized with him in Pakistan in December 2001, was given a new home in Portugal last August, and it would, therefore, have made sense for him to have been rehoused in Portugal as well.

As economic migrants to Afghanistan, the Khantumanis never posed a threat to anyone, and it is distressing that it took so long for both men to be released. In my book The Guantánamo Files, I discussed their story, based on accounts that they gave in their military review boards at Guantánamo (the Combatant Status Review Tribunals) in 2004-05:

The father had traveled to Afghanistan in 1999 in search of work, finding a job in a restaurant in Kabul and bringing ten members of his family over in June 2001, including Muhammed, his grandmother and an eight-month old baby. Another six family members — [Muhammed]’s uncle’s family — arrived a week before 9/11, but after hearing about the attack on America the family fled to Jalalabad, where they stayed for a month, and then made their way on foot to Pakistan. On the way, their guide advised [Abdul Nasser] to let the women and children travel by car, to make them less of a target for highway robbers, but when he and his son arrived in Pakistan the local villagers handed them over to the Pakistani army.

In his tribunal, Abdul Nasser also spoke about his reasons for traveling to Afghanistan, stating, “I was always looking for an alternative country that I could immigrate to and live with my family. I thought about going to the free world, which is the Western world, especially after I heard a lot about freedom, stability and justice in these countries, but all the doors were closed.”

Unfortunately, both father and son experienced brutal treatment after their capture, both in Pakistani and US custody. Muhammed explained that, while in Pakistani custody, in three separate prisons, he and his father were “subjected to beatings and harsh torture,” and his nose was broken. He added that throughout this ordeal “there were Americans present,” and this account was echoed by his father, who said that the Pakistanis “were torturing us really hard,” and the Americans “were looking and standing right there. The Americans were present. I am sure about that because they were the ones who interrogated us.”

In addition, Muhammed explained that, in the US prison at Kandahar airport (where the prisoners were processed for Guantánamo), his father’s forehead was fractured “and the Red Cross saw this and wrote a report,” and he added that he received a fracture to his left hand, as well as suffering “many diseases” and “other methods of psychological torture,” including sleep deprivation.

He also explained that, during interrogation at Camp X-Ray (the rudimentary first prison at Guantánamo), “one of the interrogators brought two wires connected to electricity and said that if you do not say that you and your father are from al-Qaeda or Taliban, I will place these in your neck,’” and that the abuse continued in Camp Delta (Camp X-Ray’s more permanent replacement), where he said that he was “threatened with violence,” and that “an interrogator threatened to send him to torture in a foreign country.”

Muhammed’s story is also notable for a number of false allegations made by one of his fellow prisoners, which were exposed by his Personal Representative (a military officer assigned to him in place of a lawyer) during his tribunal. As I explained in an article in 2007, based on a series of ground-breaking stories by Corine Hegland for the National Journal:

In his tribunal, [Muhammed Khantumani] denied an allegation that he had attended the al-Farouq training camp [the main training camp for Arabs, associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11] with such vigor that his Personal Representative decided to investigate the matter further. When he looked at the classified evidence, however, he found that only one man … claimed to have seen him at al-Farouq, and had identified him as being there three months before he arrived in Afghanistan. As Corine Hegland described it, “The curious US officer pulled the classified file of the accuser, saw that he had accused 60 men, and, suddenly skeptical, pulled the files of every detainee the accuser had placed at the one training camp. None of the men had been in Afghanistan at the time the accuser said he saw them at the camp.”

Even so, the Personal Representative’s protestations were in vain, because, as I explained on Muhammed Khantumani’s release, he was “judged to be an ‘enemy combatant,’ and had to wait for nearly five years before President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force finally conducted a comprehensive review of his case, and … established that the evidence against him was unreliable.”

The same conclusion, it should be noted, was also reached by the Task Force in Abdul Nasser’s case. As the Center for Constitutional Rights explained to me, although his habeas corpus petition had not been heard by the time of his release, he was “cleared to leave Guantánamo on the basis of a unanimous determination” by the Task Force, which suggests that the lurid allegations against him that can be found in publicly available documents — including claims that he “was identified by a senior al-Qaeda operative as reportedly being part of a terrorist group,” and that he was “commonly known as an explosives expert” — were conjured up either by the same prisoner who caused his son such problems, or by other patently unreliable witnesses whose lies have been regularly exposed by judges in the District Court in Washington D.C., in their rulings on the prisoners’ habeas petitions.

With Abdul Nasser’s release, the long years of torture, lies and brutality are now behind him, but as CCR also noted, “father and son’s profound hope now is for the day when they may finally be reunited as a family.”

An Uzbek resettled in Latvia

Last Thursday, following the release of Abdul Aziz Naji and Abdul Nasser Khantumani, the Pentagon announced that two more prisoners had been released, in Latvia and Spain, bringing the prison’s population to 176. Neither was publicly identified, but in February this year RFE/RL reported that Latvia had “agreed to accept an Uzbek citizen currently held at the US detention center at Guantánamo Bay.” The report added, “The name of the Uzbek citizen was not disclosed, although it was reported that he speaks fluent Russian, is single, has relatives in Uzbekistan, and is prepared to learn the Latvian language.” In addition, Latvian Foreign Minister Maris Riekstins told journalists at the time that the government “will provide the man with refugee status, a monthly allowance, and an apartment.” It was also reported that the Latvian security service would “monitor” the ex-prisoner.

Given that, at the start of the year, just two Uzbeks remained at Guantánamo, and that one of these men, Ali Sher Hamidullah, was reportedly the Uzbek rehoused in Switzerland on January 26, it seems likely that the man given a new home in Latvia is Kamalludin Kasimbekov, who was cleared for release in 2006 by a military review board under the Bush administration, but who continued to be held because of well-founded fears that he would be tortured if returned to his homeland.

24 years old at the time of his capture, Kasimbekov told his tribunal at Guantánamo that he and a friend had fled Uzbekistan after his friend accidentally killed a policeman while driving his car, and had ended up in a training camp run by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a militant group aligned with the Taliban, where, he said, those in charge of the camp took away his military ID, which he needed to go home, and flew him and five or six others to Kabul, where he worked in an auto shop.

He went on to explain that in 2001 he requested to go home, and asked for money and his military ID, but that when he received no response he decided to run away, only to be captured while traveling from Kabul to Mazar-e-Sharif in a minivan taxi, imprisoned by the IMU for six months and then released on September 16, 2001 “with agreement that I will help in a battle.” Sent to the front lines in Kunduz, the last Taliban stronghold in northern Afghanistan, he explained that he was “helping with all kinds of household work for about a month or so,” but that, after the aerial bombardment of Kunduz by US forces, when there were “lots of dead bodies” and a surrender was negotiated between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, he refused to retreat with the IMU and instead went to Abdul Mumin, a Northern Alliance commander, and handed himself in with his gun. He added, “There were no bullets shot from my weapon.”

An Afghan resettled in Spain

For now, the remaining mystery regarding the prisoners released last week concerns the man released in Spain. In February this year, the Spanish government agreed to accept five men from Guantánamo. On the basis that none of them must have criminal record, the government pledged to give them a residence permit and the right to work, and also pledged that they would have freedom of movement within Spain, but would not be allowed to leave the country.

The first of these men, Walid Hijazi, a Palestinian, arrived in February, the second, Yasim Basardah, a Yemeni, arrived in May, and the third, who arrived last week, has, to date, only been identified as an Afghan. With no clues as to his identity, it is difficult to speculate as to why he was not released in Afghanistan, but as a website, The Americas Post, explained this week, confirming his arrival at the military base of Torrejón de Ardoz, the Spanish government’s arrangement with the US “has not been easy for the hosting country, because most of the former prisoners have deep psychological problems and their insertion into society is difficult,” and, perhaps as a result, “no more arrivals are expected at least until after the summer.”

Updating the story of Walid Hijazi, which I reported in May, the blog explained that he arrived with “serious psychological” problems as a result of his detention, “and lived [for] several months in a room [in] a small family hotel in a city in northern Spain. He was offered a transfer to a flat, but the NGO in charge [was] unable to reach an agreement with him. Finally, the city government moved him and brought him to live in a residence of the same NGO.” The blog added that Hijazi is having problems learning Spanish, a “fundamental issue that can truly integrate him in Spain and get a job.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on The Public Record, Eurasia Review, and New Left Project.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 60 prisoners released from February 2009 to mid-July 2010, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland, 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini).

I’ll discuss the stories of Abd al-Nisr Mohammed Khantumani and Abdul Aziz Naji in a separate article, but for now the focus must be on the legal maneuvering that led to the repatriation of Abdul Aziz Naji, because, for the first time in Guantánamo’s history, a prisoner has been sent home against his will, even though Doris Tennant, one of his lawyers, told the Washington Post two weeks ago that he was “adamantly opposed to going back.” At the weekend, another of his lawyers, Ellen Lubell, told the Miami Herald that Naji “fears extremists will try to recruit him — associating him with Guantánamo — and will torture or kill him if he resists.” She added, “He has nothing against the Algerian government, but he fears that the government will be unable to protect him from Algerian extremists.” In a press release, the Center for Constitutional Rights explained that Naji “fled various forms of persecution in Algeria many years ago, including having been attacked by an extremist.” CCR also sounded a note of caution about how the Algerian government will receive Naji, stating, “we are deeply concerned that he will disappear into secret detention.”

These are valid concerns, as Algeria has a poor human rights record. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations (PDF, pp. 108-9) regularly express concerns about the use of torture in Algeria, and in its 2009 report on human rights in Algeria, the US State Department noted, “Local human rights lawyers maintained that torture continued to occur in detention facilities, most often against those arrested on ‘security grounds.’”

In contrast, an Obama administration official, speaking anonymously, told the Washington Post two weeks ago, “We take some care in evaluating countries for repatriation. In the case of Algeria, there is an established track record and we have given that a lot of weight. The Algerians have handled this pretty well: You don’t have recidivism and you don’t have torture.” This was a bold statement to make, in light of the allegations made by NGOs and the UN, and concerns about torture or other ill-treatment were not diminished by a response to the news of Naji’s repatriation in Monday’s Washington Post, in which it was noted that “The government said that Algeria has provided diplomatic assurances that Naji would not be mistreated, assurances that administration officials say are credible because 10 other detainees have been returned to Algeria without incident.”

The problems with this statement concern the “diplomatic assurances,” and the claim that 10 men have been repatriated “without incident.” On the “diplomatic assurances,” Human Rights Watch explained in a press release that its own research “has shown that diplomatic assurances provided by receiving countries, which are legally unenforceable, do not provide an effective safeguard against torture and ill-treatment,” and, on the status of the 10 men returned, although there have been no allegations of torture, there has been very little information at all about the conditions in which they have been held, and what has emerged publicly is not reassuring, as it reveals both prolonged pre-trial detention, and calls for punitive sentences from the prosecutors. As I explained in January this year:

[F]rustratingly little is known about the eight Algerians repatriated from Guantánamo between July 2008 and January 2009, although one indication of how the Algerian justice system deals with returned Guantánamo prisoners was provided in November 2009, when the BBC reported that, 15 months after two of these men were repatriated, they had been acquitted after a trial in which the prosecutor had called for prison sentences of 20 years.

Alarmingly, despite Abdul Aziz Naji’s fear of being repatriated — and the fears of five other Algerians, as revealed by the Washington Post two weeks ago — his release was not only supported by the Obama administration, but also by the Supreme Court.

Judge Gladys Kessler takes on the D.C. Circuit Court – and the Supreme Court

The spur for a legal battle that has largely been taking place without the mainstream media paying much attention — and with an alarming reliance on secrecy — was a principled stand taken by Judge Gladys Kessler, of the District Court in Washington D.C., who, single-handedly, has been attempting to uphold the United States’ obligation, under the UN Convention Against Torture, not to “expel, return (‘refouler’) or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.”

In November, Judge Kessler granted the habeas corpus petition of Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, a 49-year old Algerian, after concluding that the government’s supposed evidence relied almost entirely on unreliable confessions produced by Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who was subjected to torture in Pakistan, Morocco and at the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Kabul from April 2002 to May 2004.

Six months after Judge Kessler delivered her ruling, with bin Mohammed still not released, his lawyers asked her “to order the government to carry out his release, but to bar his transfer to Algeria, where he fears persecution or even death from either the Algerian government or from armed terrorist groups there,” as SCOTUSblog described it. As a result of two depressing rulings in the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. Circuit Court (the District Court), judges are not actually able to order the release of prisoners who have won their habeas petitions, and are not even supposed to interfere with the disposition of prisoners, whose fate, according to the Circuit Court, is entirely dependent on the whims of the Executive branch. Judge Kessler, however, was undeterred.

On June 3, she issued a temporary order barring bin Mohammed’s transfer to Algeria, and on June 10 mounted a stout defense of his right not to be forcibly repatriated, noting (PDF):

Petitioner has voiced great fear about being transferred to Algeria. He has not lived in Algeria for more than 20 years, and has no ties to that country. Because he has been designated an “enemy combatant,” he greatly fears retribution by the Algerian authorities and that he will be formally charged under the Algerian Penal Code, tortured, convicted, and very possibly executed by the Algerian Government. He has claimed that he will be caught between the Algerian Government, which will brand him as an international terrorist, and armed domestic terrorists, who oppose the existing government, often pressure individuals to join their ranks, and retaliate violently when such individuals refuse. Petitioner has made clear that he would rather suffer continued confinement in Guantánamo Bay than be placed in the control of the Algerian Government.

In response to a brief filed by the government, Judge Kessler complained that two declarations submitted, which purported to guarantee bin Mohammed’s humane treatment if returned to Algeria, “appear to be boilerplate statements which have been filed in a number of the Government’s Oppositions to Motions,” and that a third, written by Daniel Fried, President Obama’s Special Envoy on Guantánamo, “was submitted ex parte so that [bin Mohammed] has not had an opportunity to read it.” After noting that bin Mohammed’s fears “are of great concern,” and that it is “essential” that assurances received from the Algerian government, purporting to guarantee that bin Mohammed will receive “humane treatment,” are “tested,” Judge Kessler ordered Fried to appear in person in her court, explaining, “Given the centrality of those representations and assurances to the future of [bin Mohammed] and possibly to his very life, this Court has an obligation to ensure that there is real substance behind the conclusory phrases contained in Special Envoy Fried’s declarations.”

Fried never turned up, of course, because the Justice Department immediately filed an appeal with the Circuit Court, which then ordered Judge Kessler to “resolve all outstanding motions” in the case with reference to Munaf v. Geren and Kiyemba v. Obama (aka Kiyemba II), the cases that the Circuit Court had drawn on (Munaf) and issued (Kiyemba II) to demonstrate that only the Executive branch was entitled to make decisions about where to send Guantánamo prisoners. As SCOTUSblog noted, “While the order did not say that Kessler could not hold a hearing on Mohammed’s plea not to be sent to Algeria, it specified that the judge was to rule on that issue ‘without requiring testimony from Special Envoy Fried or any other United States government official,’” which, of course, “completely undercut the purpose that Kessler had” for calling the hearing in the first place.

The Circuit Court then issued an amended ruling, instructing Judge Kessler to decide the Mohammed plea “in an order from which a party can take an immediate appeal,” and as SCOTUSblog noted in response to this instruction:

The Circuit Court thus had taken over, in a significant way, the further proceedings in Kessler’s Court, and has sent her the strongest hint that she risked being overturned if she barred his transfer anew. Since it noted the binding nature of the precedents she was to observe, the Circuit Court clearly was signaling that, if it accepted the government’s view that Mohammed’s case was no different, Kessler would be found to be without authority to prevent his transfer to Algeria.

After this, the struggle between Judge Kessler and the Circuit Court was swamped in secrecy. At a hearing convened by Kessler on June 28, all the documentation was sealed, but SCOTUSblog was able to deduce, from a subsequent appeal filed by the government, that she had once more barred bin Mohammed’s transfer to Algeria. On July 8, however, in another secret hearing, the Circuit Court “summarily overturned” Judge Kessler’s ban, prompting SCOTUSblog to note that the court’s order “continues a seldom-interrupted string of rulings by the Circuit Court against detainees challenging their confinement or transfer,” which “contrasts with a majority of rulings by District Court judges upholding detainees’ challenges under federal habeas law.”

The final blow for bin Mohammed — and for those who, like Judge Kessler, had quaintly presumed that the “non-refoulement” requirement of the UN Convention Against Torture might actually mean something to the judiciary and the Executive branch — came last Friday, when, by 5 votes to 3, the Supreme Court sided with the Circuit Court. As SCOTUSblog noted, the ruling was “the first indication that the Supreme Court will not allow federal judges to interfere with government controls on who leaves or stays at Guantánamo Bay.”

Although three of the justices — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor — dissented, noting that they “would grant the stay to afford the Court time to consider, in the ordinary course, important questions raised in this case and not resolved in Munaf v. Geren,” just a few hours later the Supreme Court unanimously approved the forced repatriation of Abdul Aziz Naji.

This was a bleak day for US justice, not only because it involved the Supreme Court blithely disregarding the UN Convention Against Torture’s “non-refoulement” obligation, joining in an unholy trinity with the D.C. Circuit Court and the Obama administration, but also because it brings to an abrupt, cruel, and — I believe — illegal conclusion a struggle to release prisoners without violating the UN Convention Against Torture, which, for the most part, was actually respected by the Bush administration.

The Bush administration’s record on not returning prisoners to torture

The long history of the authorities grappling with the “non-refoulement” obligation at Guantánamo began with the Uighurs, 22 Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province, who were mostly seized in Pakistan in December 2001 after crossing from Afghanistan, where they had been living in a run-down settlement in the Tora Bora mountains, thwarted in their attempts to travel to Turkey or Europe in search of work, or nursing futile hopes of rising up against their only enemy, the Chinese government.

With the Uighurs, the Bush administration recognized its “non-refoulement” obligation, refusing to return them to China, and finding new homes for five of the men in Albania in 2006. When the Obama administration inherited the problem of the remaining 17 men, who had, in the meantime, won their habeas corpus petitions, it found new homes for 12 of them in Bermuda, Palau and Switzerland, although five still remain at Guantánamo, and, last spring, the administration turned down a plan by White House Counsel Greg Craig to bring some of the men to live in the US, which would have done more in the long run to defuse scaremongering about Guantánamo than any other gesture.

Despite the Bush administration locating some principles when it came to the Uighurs, in other cases prisoners had to fight in the courts to prevent their forcible repatriation to countries where they faced the risk of torture. In 2007, a Libyan, Abdul Rauf al-Qassim, sought the intervention of the courts to prevent his return to Libya, and after two Tunisians were repatriated in June 2007 — and were subsequently mistreated and given jail sentences (of three and seven years) after show trials — a judge intervened to prevent the repatriation of a third, Mohammed Abdul Rahman (also known as Lotfi bin Ali), and, by extension, other Tunisians in Guantánamo.

In other cases, like that of Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian who had lived in the UK, lawyers successfully sought injunctions preventing their return, and by the time Obama came to power, it was generally understood that prisoners were not be involuntarily returned to China, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia or Uzbekistan. As a result, in the last year, the Obama administration has resettled prisoners from Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Uzbekistan in Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Georgia, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia and Switzerland. Algeria was more problematical, as was demonstrated by the cases of the men who had returned voluntarily, even though there was, to be honest, no guarantee that they would be treated humanely, and my constant analogy was that return to Algeria was like Russian Roulette.

How the Circuit Court defended expansive executive power

However, all this came to an end with the Circuit Court’s intervention in the Uighurs’ case — firstly, in February 2009 (in Kiyemba v. Obama, aka Kiyemba I), when a panel of judges ruled that the courts could not order the resettlement in the US of prisoners who had won their habeas petitions but could not be repatriated, because only the Executive branch could decide matters relating to immigration. As I explained in a review of the ruling:

The judges were seemingly unmoved that this would leave the Uighurs (and, very possibly, others in Guantánamo) with no means of leaving the prison, and that it stripped the Supreme Court’s ruling in June 2008, granting the prisoners habeas corpus rights, of all practical meaning, if it was not possible for judges to order their release. In the judges’ words, however, “the political branches have the exclusive power … to decide which aliens may, and which aliens may not, enter the United States, and on what terms.”

The second blow came last September (in another Kiyemba v. Obama case, identified as Kiyemba II), after the Uighurs’ lawyers asked the Court of Appeals to reconsider its opinion en banc (in other words, with all the judges ruling, instead of just a panel of three), and also sought assurances that the courts would be able to act if the government proposed sending their clients to countries where they faced the risk of torture. However, as I explained at the time:

[N]ot only did the court refuse to reconsider its ruling, but the judges also refused the Uighurs’ request for the court’s assistance “to prevent their transfer to a country where they are likely to be subjected to further detention or to torture,”, drawing on Munaf v. Geren, a case from 2008 in which “two American citizens held in the custody of the United States military in Iraq petitioned for writs of habeas corpus, seeking to enjoin the Government from transferring them to Iraqi custody for criminal prosecution in the Iraqi courts.” In Munaf, although “The Court held the district court had jurisdiction over the petitions,” it also ruled that “it could not enjoin the Government from transferring the petitioners to Iraqi custody,” because “that concern is to be addressed by the political branches, not the judiciary.”

It is this narrow reading of Munaf that has particularly enraged those opposed to the Circuit Court’s resolute endorsement of executive power — and which at least caused some consternation last Friday to Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor. Essentially, though, the Circuit Court’s ruling in Kiyemba II dictates what happens to prisoners like Abdul Aziz Naji — and, presumably, Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed — when the administration tires of trying to find new homes for them, and decides to subject them involuntarily to the Russian Roulette repatriation package that Abdul Aziz Naji received this week.

Although government officials told the Washington Post on Monday that they “will nonetheless continue to examine each case individually before any repatriation,” noting that some officials “have expressed some concern about returning one of the Algerians [Ahmed Belbacha] who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in absentia” last year, for what his lawyers think was the crime of speaking out about his fears of repatriation, there now appears to be no obstacle to prevent the Obama administration from sending the other four Algerians home whenever it feels like it.

To discover that such shameless disregard for the UN Convention Against Torture has come not only from the Supreme Court, but also from the man who promised to close Guantánamo (but then failed to do so), and who also promised to uphold the absolute ban on torture (while refusing to prosecute anyone who authorized its use in the previous eight years), is depressing news indeed.

Note: With these releases, 178 prisoners remain at Guantánamo. One of these men, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement, after a one-sided trial by Military Commission in October 2008, in which he refused to mount a defense. Another prisoner, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, is in prison in New York, awaiting a federal court trial that was recently approved. 594 prisoners have been released (or, in some cases, transferred to the custody of their home governments, or of other governments), and six men died, five in mysterious circumstances.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on The Smirking Chimp, The Public Record and New Left Project.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 60 prisoners released from February 2009 to mid-July 2010, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland, 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini).

Odaini’s case had become an embarrassment for the administration, which had been obliged to concede that it had no basis on which to appeal the judge’s decision. As an official explained to the Washington Post on June 19, it would be “unconscionable” to appeal Odaini’s case. “This is a bad case to argue,” the official stated. “There is nothing there. The bottom line is: We don’t have anything on this kid. The judge wants a progress report by June 25th. We have to be able to report something other than we are thinking about it.”

Alarmingly, one of the administration officials who spoke to the Washington Post also stated that the administration was prepared to release him because senior officials were “comfortable” with making an exception for him “because of the guy’s background, his family and where he comes from in Yemen,” thereby admitting that the perception of a prisoner’s family background is now more important than whether he is innocent or not.

In order to release Odaini, the administration had to break a moratorium on repatriating any Yemeni prisoners, which was introduced by President Obama in January, in response to a wave of hysteria following the revelation that the would-be Christmas Day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, had been recruited in Yemen.

Implicit in the moratorium was the unacceptable notion that all Yemenis were potential terrorists, but the President chose to ignore this so as not to make his life uncomfortable, and, in doing so, also ignored the fact that some Yemenis were going to win their habeas petitions while the moratorium was in place. If he had any doubt about this, he need only have consulted the final report of his own Guantánamo Review Task Force, which had concluded that, of the 97 Yemenis still held, 59 should be released.

Obama’s indifference paved the way for the devastating ruling on May 26, when Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. revealed not only that Odaini had been cleared for release by the Bush administration, and by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, but also that, since his arrival in Guantánamo in June 2002, interrogators and the prison authorities had repeatedly approved his release. This was so intolerable that Judge Kennedy forcefully ordered Odaini’s release and concluded his ruling by stating:

Respondents have kept a young man from Yemen in detention in Cuba from age eighteen to age twenty-six. They have prevented him from seeing his family and denied him the opportunity to complete his studies and embark on a career. The evidence before the Court shows that holding Odaini in custody at such great cost to him has done nothing to make the United States more secure. There is no evidence that Odaini has any connection to al-Qaeda. Consequently, his detention is not authorized by the AUMF [the Authorization of the Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks, and used to justify the detentions at Guantánamo]. The Court therefore emphatically concludes that Odaini’s motion must be granted.

What makes this story all the more depressing, as Charlie Savage explained in the New York Times last week, is that the administration already knew that it would lose the case. As Savage wrote, “The suspension on transfers meant that habeas corpus lawsuits that had been frozen since the detainees were due to be released anyway started to move forward, putting the Justice Department in the position of fighting to keep the detainees imprisoned.” As I added in an article yesterday, “In other words, the Justice Department is arguing in court that the administration should be allowed to continue holding men that it has already conceded it has no reason to hold.”

Another depressing realization is that Odaini was not released until now not just because of inertia on the part of the administration, but because, as law professor (and former Guantánamo military defense attorney) Lt. Col. David Frakt has explained, for 15 days before his release, Odaini was held “in the status of ‘Congressional prisoner,’ a status for which there is no Constitutional authority,” while the administration fretted about whether it could break its appalling moratorium on just this one occasion.

Lt. Col. Frakt was referring to a law, passed last summer, which requires the administration to give Congress 15 days’ notice before releasing anyone from Guantánamo, and his full explanation of why this is unconstitutional, which he illustrated with reference to his own client, Mohammed Jawad, who was held for 22 days before being released last summer, after winning his habeas petition, is revealing:

I consider this Congressional notification requirement to be blatantly unconstitutional as a violation of the separation of powers. In Jawad’s case, it meant that after the Executive Branch and the Judiciary had concluded there was no lawful basis for the military to detain Mohammed Jawad (after the Department of Justice ultimately conceded the habeas corpus petition), the military was required to continue to detain him at Guantánamo at the order of the legislature, Congress. As I explained in Federal District Court, this placed Jawad in the status of “Congressional prisoner,” a status for which there is no Constitutional authority.

He added:

[F]or those detainees determined to be unlawfully held, this law simply arbitrarily extends their unlawful stay at Guantánamo. This provision, coupled with the refusal to authorize funds for detainees to be resettled in the United States — even those determined to be innocent of any wrongdoing who should qualify for political asylum — shows the extent of Congressional depravity on any issues related to detainees.

For Mohammed Hassan Odaini, his vulnerability to the whims of an unprincipled administration and a constitutionally depraved Congress is now over, but others are not so fortunate. In May, Congress proposed to extend the period in which it can hold men as “Congressional prisoners” from 15 to 30 days, and the administration has been true to its word regarding the moratorium. When administration officials spoke to the Washington Post three weeks ago, one of them stressed that it was just a one-off exception, and that the moratorium was still in place. “What isn’t being considered is lifting, in a blanket fashion, the moratorium on detainee transfers to Yemen,” he said.

This is in spite of the fact that, as the officials also explained, President Obama “may come under further pressure to quickly release Yemenis besides Odaini,” because “[a]s many as 20 more Yemenis could be ordered released by the courts for lack of evidence to justify their continued detention.” The official added, “There is a group of Yemenis who are going to win their habeas cases. Some of them will not be as clear as this case, but some will be, and that poses a real dilemma.”

One of those men may be Hussein Almerfedi, who won his habeas petition last week, and others will doubtless follow, given that the Justice Department is now pursuing cases that it knows it will lose. However, in releasing Odaini — and Odaini alone — the administration has just demonstrated that it will put off thinking about this dilemma until, as with Mohammed Hassan Odaini, it has no choice.

Note: With this release, 180 prisoners remain at Guantánamo. One of these men, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement, after a one-sided trial by Military Commission in October 2008, in which he refused to mount a defense. Another prisoner, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, is in prison in New York, awaiting a federal court trial that was approved yesterday. 592 prisoners have been released (or, in some cases, transferred to the custody of their home governments, or of other governments), and six men died, five in mysterious circumstances.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners (my first article on the brand-new website — check it out!). Cross-posted on Eurasia Review, Uruknet, Rebel News and Blog from Middle East.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 59 prisoners released from February 2009 to May 2010, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 unidentified Uzbek to Switzerland, 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain.

One of the men “described their living conditions as poor — having only beds and a sink at their disposal and being allowed to leave their rooms for only an hour per day,” and explained that they “are not allowed contact with anyone except for personnel in the facility and their lawyer.” The men are also protesting about the fact that their status in the country has not yet been finalized, and about what they regard as a broken promise to find housing for them in a town with a Muslim community, so that they can begin to build new lives for themselves.

On Friday, as IPS reported, the former prisoner elaborated on the conditions under which the three men are held. “Conditions here are worse than in Guantánamo, I can say that with no hesitation,” he said. “In Guantánamo I was allowed to be outside for 20 hours a day. Here I am allowed to go out only for one hour. I have no idea why. In Guantánamo I was allowed to pray with other Muslims … but here that is not allowed either. They say it would be a security risk. Why? I do not understand. No one from the Slovak authorities has spoken to us. When I ask about all these things they keep saying the same thing — that they do not have time to talk to us.” He added, “In other countries people like us get spending money, housing and Internet connections. We are not allowed the Internet. Why not? They will not tell us.”

Until this story broke, the identities of the three men were unknown, but their spokesman identified himself immediately as Adel Fattough Ali El-Gazzar. A 44-year old accountant and former Egyptian army officer, with a master’s degree in economics, El-Gazzar, who is also fluent in English, was first cleared for release from Guantánamo by a military review board in 2006 or 2007, and was then cleared again last year by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, which reviewed the cases of all the Guantánamo prisoners, and recommended, at the time of his release, that 114 of the 198 men still in Guantánamo should be released (although only 17 men, including El-Gazzar and his two companions, have been released since the review was completed).

El-Gazzar had traveled to Pakistan in 2000 as a missionary, and had spent a year traveling around the country, meeting different people and spreading the word of Allah until the 9/11 attacks occurred. Throughout that period, he had, over a two-day period, also visited a military training camp run by the militant group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, but in Guantánamo he swiftly dealt with groundless allegations that he was a member of the group. In his tribunal in 2004, he gave the authorities a brief history lesson about how the Pakistani army had used LeT as one of its proxy armies in the Kashmir struggle, how LeT had a history of discord with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and how unimpressive he found the group’s arrangements in Pakistan. “I didn’t train there,” he said. “I was an Egyptian officer, I don’t need that type of training. It is not actually a camp, it is a joke … it is several tents on the top of a mountain.” He also explained that LeT “take people from the streets and give them training on the AK-47 then send them to Kashmir to fight. About 95 percent of them are killed crossing the border by India.”

Speaking of his arrest, he explained that, after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, as thousands of Afghan refugees streamed towards the Pakistani border, he went to the area to see how he could help, and signed up with the Saudi Red Crescent, volunteering to go into Afghanistan to help the refugees. However, just two hours after he crossed the border, when he was at a large refugee camp, it was bombed by US forces.

“I saw a light and heard a voice and then I lost consciousness,” he said in his tribunal. “When I woke up I was in a Pakistani hospital. I lost my coat, my passport, my money, everything. And I lost my leg also. Then I found myself in Pakistani custody.” Kept in the hospital for a month, he was visited by Pakistani army officers and even the governor of Quetta, and was then told that he would be taken to “a large modern hospital with good facilities and surgeons to take care of my leg,” but was handed over — or sold — to the Americans instead, possibly as one of five men taken from the hospital who were identified by US authorities as the “Quetta Five.”

In Guantánamo, in the following exchange with one of the officers in his tribunal, he explained why he thought he ended up in US custody:

Q: Do you have any theories about why the governor and the Pakistani intel folks would sell you out and turn you over to the Americans?
A: Come on man, you know what happened. In Pakistan you can buy people for $10. So what about $5,000?
Q: So they sold you?
A: Yes.

According to his lawyers at Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity, “He was then moved to [the] US prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where the routine included severe beatings, exposure to freezing temperatures, sleep deprivation for days on end, and the suspension of prisoners by their wrists.” He “endured eleven days” of this before being transferred to Guantánamo, but on arrival “it was almost six weeks since he had sustained his injures. They had gone untreated in US military custody and, as a result, he was infected with gangrene so severe that his left leg had to be amputated.”

A cooperative prisoner, El-Gazzar was soon found to have no links to terrorism, but despite being told that he would be “one of the first to leave” Guantánamo, he was held for eight years. In Guantánamo, he was also respected as a natural leader by his fellow prisoners, and in the summer of 2005, during a brief period when the authorities toyed with implementing the Geneva Conventions, he was part of a six-man “Prisoner’s Council,” which also included the British resident Shaker Aamer.

In contrast to Adel El-Gazzar, the identities of the other two men were not disclosed when the hunger strike started, but they were recently revealed in the Slovakian media, and I believe, as with El-Gazzar, that it is important to explain what is known of their stories, to counter any possible suggestion that they were connected with terrorist activities.

The first is Poolad Tsiradzho (also identified as Polad Sabir Sirajov), a 35-year old economist and translator from Azerbaijan (the only Azerbaijani held in Guantánamo), who said that he went to Afghanistan to study the Koran, and was wounded by the Northern Alliance while working as a guard at a Pakistani food warehouse in northern Afghanistan. According to his mother, who spoke to the Azerbaijani press in April 2006, he graduated in 1992 from a university in Turkey, and then worked as a translator for a Turkish construction company. She added that he had disappeared on February 16, 2001, and that she only heard that he was in Guantánamo through the International Committee of the Red Cross. She also expressed doubts that he would have joined any kind of radical group because he had “not received any religious education,” and “was not a member of any religious organization.”

In contrast to these claims, the US authorities alleged that Tsiradzho had traveled to Afghanistan to fight, after spending a year and a half in the Azerbaijani army, had trained at al-Farouq (the main training camp associated with Osama bin Laden), and had then fought on the Taliban front lines, before retreating to Kunduz and surrendering to the Northern Alliance. However, given that he was, at one point, accused of being a translator for Osama bin Laden, and given that there is ample evidence that very few allegations should be taken at face value, as the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions have demonstrated, because they largely consist of dubious statements made by the prisoners themselves or by their fellow prisoners, it is wise to regard the government’s story with suspicion, especially as Tsiradzho was cleared for release last year by the Guantánamo Review Task Force.

The other man, 41-year old Rafiq al-Hami (or Alhami), is originally from Tunisia, but explained in Guantánamo that had been working in restaurants in Germany, and had traveled to Pakistan in 1999 to study with the vast missionary organization Jamaat-al-Tablighi. Disturbingly, he is one of six men who ended up in Guantánamo after being seized in Iran and transferred to US custody in the early months of 2002 in a deal that has still never been publicly explained. Of the five men seized with him, two — both Yemenis — are still held, but two others, a Jordanian and a Yemeni, were released in 2004, and a third, an Afghan taxi driver, was released in December 2007.

This man, Aminullah Tukhi, explained that 10 prisoners in total — six Arabs, two Afghans, an Uzbek and a Tajik — had been delivered to the Americans by the Iranian government. Although six of these men are accounted for above, it is not known what happened to the other four — one of the Arabs, one of the Afghans, and the Uzbek and the Tajik — although it would be surprising if their stories ended well, because Rafiq al-Hami and the other men were all held and tortured in secret prisons run by the CIA before being sent to Guantánamo.

In a lawsuit filed last April, which has still not had the impact it should on claims that the CIA’s torture program did not begin until the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued its notorious “torture memos” on August 1, 2002, al-Hami stated, as the Associated Press described it, that, from December 2001, he was held in three CIA “dark sites,” where “his presence and his existence were unknown to everyone except his United States detainers,” and where, at various times, he was “stripped naked, threatened with dogs, shackled in painful stress positions for hours, punched, kicked and exposed to extremes of heat and cold.” He also stated that his interrogators “sprayed pepper spray on his hemorroids, causing extreme pain.”

As I explained in an article last year, in which I attempted to expose how “CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months Before DoJ Approval”:

It’s likely that all of al-Hami’s claims are true. In my book The Guantánamo Files, I wrote about him … noting [that, when] speaking of his experiences before his transfer to Guantánamo, [he] explained, “I was in … Afghan prison[s] but the interrogation was done by Americans. I was there for about a one-year period, transferring from one place to another.” He added that one of the prisons was the “Dark Prison” near Kabul, which is known, in particular, from the story of the British resident Binyam Mohamed, who spent four or five months there after being tortured for 18 months in Morocco. I have previously described the “Dark Prison” as “a medieval torture dungeon with the addition of ear-splittingly loud music and noise, which was pumped into the cells 24 hours a day,” based on accounts by prisoners who were held there, including Binyam Mohamed, who described his time there as “the worst days of his captivity” — worse than the 18 months in Morocco, where the CIA’s proxy torturers regularly sliced his genitals with a razorblade.

[Al-Hami] told his tribunal that he was tortured for three months in the “Dark Prison,” where, he said, “I was threatened. I was left out all night in the cold … I spent two months with no water, no shoes, in darkness and in the cold. There was darkness and loud music for two months. I was not allowed to pray … These things are documented. You have them.”

In the allegations against al-Hami, the US authorities claimed that he had admitted attending a military training camp in Afghanistan, but he later refuted the statements, explaining — understandably — that they had been extracted through the use of torture.

As he and his companions attempt to put pressure on the Slovak government to remove them from the detention center in which they are currently held, and to begin integrating them into normal life, I hope that these insights into their stories — and Rafiq al-Hami’s in particular — will enable those who hold their futures in their hands to understand that, after all they have been through, the last thing they need, to begin dealing with the trauma of their time at Guantánamo, is to be held in conditions that remind them of those eight years.

It may be, as Branislav Tichý, the director of Amnesty International Slovensko, explained to IPS, that Slovakian government officials “have not had this kind of situation before and so there is nothing that they can compare it with.” Tichý added, “The normal processing time for asylum applicants is three months, but the authorities say that they are not in any asylum procedures, so their status is unclear.” However, as he also explained, “This is what we, and the three men, want resolved. Amnesty has been calling on the authorities to resolve this from the day they arrived here.”

According to IPS, the Interior Ministry has “suggested the men may now be moved to a boarding house.” If this is the plan, then officials need to inform Adel El-Gazzar as soon as possible. As IPS also explained, he “remains defiant and says that until someone from the Slovak authorities speaks to him and resolves his lack of freedom and status in Slovakia, he will continue to refuse food.” As the hunger strike continues, it is perhaps fortunate for President Obama that Adel El-Gazzar has not directed his frustrations at the US, which bears the ultimate responsibility for ensuring the welfare of men who were wrongly detained, subjected to torture and other ill-treatment for eight long years, and then — it seems — unceremoniously dumped in other countries, to avoid America having to take responsibility for its own mistakes.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation. Cross-posted on Eurasia Review, United Progressives, Uruknet and Zakiraah.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 59 prisoners released from February 2009 to May 2010, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 unidentified Uzbek to Switzerland, 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain.

The complaints are not entirely unexpected. As Reuters explained when the men first arrived in the country, a spokesman for the police stated that they “were being placed in a camp for asylum seekers in the eastern part of Slovakia, Humenné, which is run by the interior ministry.” No time limit was set for their removal from this camp to a location in which they might be able to rebuild their lives, establish ties with the local community and look for work, but RTT News, a New York-based wire service, suggested that they would be “released” after “an 18-month process of acclimatization to Slovakia, including language instruction and a search for employment,” but would remain “under surveillance for an unspecified period.” This was in spite of the fact that, the week before their arrival, the Slovak Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajcak had pointed out, “The three are not criminals, none of them has been either accused or convicted.”

The three men were not identified on arrival in Slovakia, but it appears that the complaints are being driven by Adel Fattough Ali El-Gazzar, a former Egyptian army officer with a master’s degree in economics, who was first cleared for release from Guantánamo by a military review board in 2006, and was then cleared again last year by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, which reviewed the cases of all the Guantánamo prisoners, and recommended that 97 of the remaining 181 men should be released.

El-Gazzar is also an amputee, who lost a leg in a US bombing raid while visiting a refugee camp on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he had traveled to conduct humanitarian aid, and, in Guantánamo, he had been respected as a natural leader, becoming part of a six-man “Prisoner’s Council,” which also included the British resident Shaker Aamer, during a brief period in the summer of 2005 when the authorities toyed with implementing the Geneva Conventions.

According to El-Gazzar, who called Amnesty representatives on Thursday morning, he and his colleagues “are not allowed contact with anyone except for personnel in the facility and their lawyer.” In addition, he “described their living conditions as poor — having only beds and a sink at their disposal and being allowed to leave their rooms for only an hour per day.”

El-Gazzar’s claims were disputed by Bernard Priecel, the chief officer at the Interior Ministry’s Migration Bureau, who said that there was “no reason” for the men to be on a hunger strike, because they “enjoy high standards in terms of both security and the re-integration process itself and are receiving personal treatment eight hours a day, including psychological care and lessons in the Slovak language.” He added that “they do socialize, use cell phones and have an internet connection available.”

On Friday, the dpa news agency spoke to a representative of Amnesty International Slovensko, who confirmed that the men “felt isolated and badly looked after,” and also explained that they were concerned because, after five months, their legal status “was still not clear.” While continuing to refute the men’s other claims, Bernard Priecel conceded that “the lack of clarity on their legal status could be a burden for them.” As dpa added, “At the moment they [are] simply foreigners, without asylum seeker status,” even though, when they arrived in Slovakia in January, Interior Minister Robert Kalinak had “promised that their residence permit status would be cleared up quickly.”

In light of the publicity generated by the story of the hunger strike — something which, ironically, the men may well have learned in Guantánamo — it is to be hoped that the Slovakian government will move swiftly to formalize their residence permit status and to rehouse them somewhere other than a camp for asylum seekers.

It is clear, however, that the blame for the men’s feelings of isolation and abandonment lies not just with the Slovak government, but also with the EU as a whole, which has failed to establish a coherent policy regarding standards of care for the 17 men who, since Barack Obama became President, have been resettled in Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain (15 others have been resettled in Bermuda, Georgia, Palau and Switzerland).

While most of these men seems to be coping reasonably well with their adjustment to life in a new country after the traumatizing effects of their long imprisonment in Guantánamo, former prisoners in the UK, who are in touch with released prisoners around the world, report that the man released in Hungary last December, a Palestinian, is also struggling to cope with his isolation.

Part of the problem lies with attempts — or the lack of attempts — to reunite these men with their families, if they are married. Although the French government succeeded in reuniting Lakhdar Boumediene, an Algerian released in France last May, with his wife and son, and the Irish government did the same for Oybek Jabbarov, an Uzbek released in Ireland last September, who was reunited with his wife and two sons in December, other ex-prisoners are still cut off from their families, and for the Palestinian in Hungary, who does not even have the companionship of other ex-prisoners, this is particularly hard to bear.

However, while some of these problems need addressing across the member states of the EU, the main responsibility for this generally chaotic state of affairs rests with the Obama administration, which has been remarkably opaque about what provisions it makes for former prisoners resettled in other countries, and which, moreover, has compounded these problems by refusing to accept its own responsibility for the Bush administration’s largely indiscriminate detention policies.

These problems began in earnest in April 2009, when President Obama called a halt to an admirable plan to provides homes on the US mainland for two cleared Guantánamo prisoners who could not be repatriated. The plan had been conceived by President Obama’s most senior legal advisor, White House Counsel Greg Craig, and was supported by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and defense secretary Robert Gates, but when the news was leaked, and the President came under pressure from Republican critics, the men in question — two of the 17 Uighurs in Guantánamo, Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, whose release had been ordered by a US court in October 2008 — were cast back into a disturbing legal limbo.

Emboldened by the President’s capitulation, his critics in Congress — both Republicans and members of his own party — then passed a law preventing him from bringing any cleared prisoner to live in the US, putting all the pressure for rehousing these men into the hands of Daniel Fried, a senior diplomat who had been appointed as the Obama administration’s Special Envoy to Guantánamo in March 2009.

In a candid interview with the BBC in September 2009, Fried explained that, although he would “not criticize Congress … It is fair to say, as just an objective statement, that the US could resettle more detainees [worldwide], had we been willing to take in some.”

That, of course, is something of an understatement, but as the plight of the men in Slovakia and Hungary shows, the least the US can do now is to ensure that it is not just dumping former prisoners in Europe and walking away, but is prepared to ensure that they receive as much support as possible — in terms of housing, financial support, psychological welfare, cultural and linguistic integration, and the search for employment — to facilitate their transition to a normal, stable life after the long years of freedom that they were so unjustly denied.

POSTSCRIPT: A journalist friend in Slovakia has written to me to say that he has recently spoken to Adel Fattough Ali El-Gazzar. “He was really upset about the conditions they live in here,” my friend explained, adding, “He told me that firstly, in Guantánamo, the Slovak delegation didn’t mention the word detention — they told them that they would be free with some restrictions. When they arrived in Slovakia they told them they had to stay in a detention facility for asylum seekers for six months, but after that they would get a house in town with Muslim community. But one month ago they told the men that plan had changed and they would go to another detention facility for another six months. He was really frustrated and that’s the reason why they started the hunger strike.”

POSTSCRIPT 2: I wrote to my Slovak friend to ask if he could clarify whether the men had first been held in Humenné, an Asylum Seeker Reception Centre in the east of Slovakia, as Reuters suggested on their arrival in Slovakia in January, and had recently been moved to Medved’ov, a Detention Centre in the south west of the country. He replied that Adel “didnt mention anything about Humenné, so I assume they never have been there. They arrived on 25th January at Bratislava airport and the government accommodated them in Medved’ov.” Crucially, he also explained that Slovak officials “don’t want to comment their status,” and are claiming that the only reason that the men are upset is because they have post-traumatic stress disorder. I don’t want to leap to judgment, but as I explained my Slovak friend, “It sounds as though the government officials are being rather insensitive regarding the men’s needs, both psychologically and emotionally, if they are so dismissive of the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder on men held in a Detention Centre in a new country, with very little support.”

Note: Please see the excellent Global Detention Project website for detailed information about detention centres around the world.

For updates on this story, including more information about Adel El-Gazzar, and the stories of the two men released with him (Poolad Tsiradzho, an Azerbaijani, and Rafiq al-Hami, a Tunisian), see: “It was better in Guantánamo,” Complains Egyptian Held in Slovak Detention Center, and Who Are the Three Ex-Guantánamo Prisoners on Hunger Strike in Slovakia?

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on Eurasia Review,

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 59 prisoners released from February 2009 to May 2010, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Egyptian and 2 prisoners of undisclosed nationality to Slovakia, 1 unidentified Uzbek to Switzerland; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain.

Soon after his arrival, RTT News explained, “Neither [Bulgarian Interior Minister Tsvetan] Tsvetanov nor the Pentagon disclosed his identity, but local media reported that the man was a 38-year-old Syria-born Kurd named Masum Abda Mohammed.” The news report added that Tsvetanov has stated that Mohammed was “accompanied by his relatives,” which, if confirmed, will demonstrate a certain generosity of spirit on the part of the Bulgarian government, and will augur well for his psychological adjustment to life after Guantánamo in a new and unknown country.

While the release of prisoners in Western Europe — or even the suggestion of it — has generally provoked ferocious media attention, reporting in Eastern Europe has been noticeably more muted — as with the release of a prisoner in Hungary in November, and three prisoners in Slovakia in January this year, where the anonymity of the men appears to have been thoroughly preserved (although whether this is a good thing or not is difficult to ascertain, as, without outside scrutiny, there appears to be no way of knowing whether their resettlement is proceeding smoothly or not).

However, with the identity of the man released in Bulgaria exposed, I thought it would be useful to explain what is known of his story, to dispel any doubts that might linger, in Bulgaria or elsewhere, regarding whether or not he poses any threat. As I have learned though conversations with journalists in Georgia, Slovakia and Switzerland, it is easy for people in host nations to be influenced by the Bush administration’s enduring propaganda regarding the prisoners — that they were “the worst of the worst” — and not to appreciate that the majority of the men were sold to the US military by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, often very far from any battlefield, and that, moreover, the Obama administration would not release prisoners that officials regard as a threat to the US or to anyone else.

Part of the problem is that documents detailing the US authorities’ supposed evidence against the prisoners are readily available, without any editorial comment, even though they should be stamped with a warning, to indicate that much of the information is not necessarily accurate. This is because much of it — as judges have been discovering while examining prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions — is untrustworthy information, masquerading as evidence, which was extracted through the coercive interrogations of the prisoners themselves, or of their fellow prisoners.

In this, the case of Masum Abda Mohammed (who was identified in Guantánamo as Maasoum Abdah Mouhammad, but who stated that his name was Bilal) is typical. What is certain is that he and three other Syrians, who had been sharing a house in Kabul at the time of the US-led invasion in October 2001, were seized while crossing the Pakistani border in December 2001, and subsequently transferred to US custody.

After that, the US authorities began interrogating them — for “actionable intelligence,” as they did with all the prisoners — and, along the way, began collecting information, in a shockingly haphazard manner, which, essentially as a by-product of the interrogations’ main purpose, established narratives that purported to justify their detention. Discovering how much of this information is true is a puzzle that I have been deciphering for years, that judges have been grappling with in US courts for the last year and a half, and that the Obama administration’s interagency Task Force dealt with last year in Mouhammad’s case, when, while reviewing all the prisoners’ cases, they concluded that there was no reason for him to be held.

Whether the Task Force reached a similar conclusion about the other three men seized with him — 24-year old Ahmed Ahjam, 19-year old Ali Shaaban, and 20-year old Abu Omar al-Hamawe — is unknown, but it is possible, as three of the seven remaining Syrians in Guantánamo had been cleared by the Task Force last October, and several dozen more prisoners were cleared after that date, although to the best of my knowledge the other men are still held. Certainly, the impression given by Mouhammad, and by the other three men, is that they were essentially economic migrants, who had left Syria for the opportunities — spurious or otherwise — that were advertised in Afghanistan, and were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As Mouhammad explained at Guantánamo, and as I described it in my book The Guantánamo Files:

[He and the others] had been living together in a house in the Wazar Akbar Khan area of Kabul. This was one of the more upmarket areas of the capital, where most of the embassies and other grand houses had been taken over by senior figures in the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but although the Americans described their house as “a safe house where five to 20 personnel armed with AK-47 rifles could be found at any time,” which was used for “money and document forging operations” for al-Qaeda, Mouhammed described it as “a normal house, a place to eat, drink and sleep.” Al-Hamawe added that it was close to the Pakistani embassy and that their neighbors, who worked for the Red Cross, “knew that all of us were not fighters or Taliban, just refugees.”

As I also explained:

The four men certainly matched the profiles of economic migrants, drifting from country to country in search of employment, and drawn to Afghanistan by its Arab-influenced reputation for welcoming Muslims from all around the world. They said that only seven people lived at the house (themselves, the owner, and two other Syrians), and that they all put money in to keep the place running. Al-Hamawe worked at a store in Kabul, but planned to move to Pakistan when a friend sent him money from Syria, Mouhammed, who had been a policeman and a grocer in Syria, had saved some money while working, and planned to move on to Jordan, Shaaban had been an ironsmith in his father’s store and went to Afghanistan because he wanted to move there, and, according to US intelligence, Ahjam worked for al-Wafa [a Saudi humanitarian aid charity, which the Bush administration regarded as being tied to al-Qaeda, although no proof of this was ever forthcoming, and almost all of those who worked for the charity, including its Saudi director, were subsequently released].

In disputing Mouhammad’s story, the authorities not only alleged that the house was a safe house, which he “operated,” but also, over the years, built up a picture involving claims that he “trained in al-Qaeda camps” and “was a fighter in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan” (where a showdown between al-Qaeda and the US military took place around the time of his capture). These are typical allegations leveled against those seized crossing the Pakistani border, but in the courts — the only objective forum in which allegations like these have been tested — judges have often dissected them and found them to be unpersuasive.

In Mouhammad’s case, he was never given an opportunity to clear his name in a courtroom, because he was released before any ruling was delivered regarding his habeas petition. As a result, he remains, officially, tagged as an “enemy combatant,” but it is to be hoped that, in Bulgaria, if his story ever surfaces, those who try to construct a narrative from the collection of uncorroborated statements and allegations in his file realize that the best indicator of the reliability of the Bush administration’s supposed evidence is that Obama’s Task Force authorized his release, having concluded, presumably, that his own account was more reliable than the one concocted by the authorities in Guantánamo after years of pointless interrogations.

The Bulgarians are, moreover, to be congratulated for offering Maasoum Mouhammad a new home, and for recognizing that a Kurdish Syrian refugee, deprived of eight years of his life in Guantánamo, could only expect far worse treatment had he ended up back in Syria, whose prisons — full of the most ill-defined dissidents — are amongst the most feared, and least accountable in the world.

POSTSCRIPT: Today (May 17), Saba, the Yemen News Agency, reported that the Yemeni released in Spain is named Yasin, and that he was released after he “was found cooperative with the authorities.” This suggests that he may be Yasim Basardah (aka Yasin Basardh), who won his habeas case last March.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and currently on tour in the UK), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 57 prisoners released from February 2009 to March 2010, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 3 prisoners of undisclosed nationality to Slovakia, 1 unidentified Uzbek to Switzerland; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland.

All five men were cleared for release from Guantánamo on two or three separate occasions — through Bush-era military review boards, through the deliberations of an interagency Task Force established by President Obama, and, in some cases, through successfully having their habeas corpus petitions granted by a US court. However, difficulties arose when it came to freeing them because they feared torture or other ill-treatment if returned to their home countries, and the US government (first under George W. Bush, and now under Barack Obama) recognized its obligations, under international treaties, not to repatriate them, but to find other countries prepared to take them instead.

The fact that Georgia — the former Soviet satellite in the Caucasus — is the new home of three of these men, and not the US state, demonstrates another obstacle to the men’s release. Had President Obama acted decisively last April, two Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, seized by mistake in December 2001) would have been freed in the US, and others would undoubtedly have followed. However, when the President bowed to pressure from Republican critics, and turned down a plan, put forward by White House Counsel Greg Craig, and backed by defense secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which involved bringing the two men to live in the US, the job of Obama’s Special Envoy, Daniel Fried, who was charged with finding new homes for dozens of cleared prisoners from countries including Algeria, China, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Uzbekistan, was made considerably more difficult.

America’s allies had to overcome their obvious impulse — refusing to help unless the US also acknowledged its own mistakes by giving new homes to cleared prisoners — and it is a tribute to the governments of Switzerland and Georgia that they felt able to place humanitarian concerns above political pragmatism by accepting the men. Switzerland had already accepted an Uzbek ex-prisoner in January this year, and Georgia now joins Switzerland in a distinguished club that also includes Albania, Belgium, Bermuda, France, Hungary, Ireland, Palau, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain. These countries have all shown up the US (and other European countries, including the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Denmark), who have turned their backs on the dozens of cleared prisoners who will languish in Guantánamo until new homes can be found for them.

The Uighur brothers released in Switzerland

The two men given new homes in the Swiss canton of Jura are brothers, Arkin Mahmud, 45, and Bahtiyar Mahnut, 34, Two of the 22 Uighurs originally held at Guantánamo (five of whom were released by George W. Bush in Albania in 2006), the men had been living in a small, rundown settlement in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains at the time of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, either because they had been thwarted in their attempts to travel to Turkey or Europe in search of work, or because they nurtured futile hopes of finding some way to rise up against the Chinese government. They were sold to US forces by Pakistani villagers when their temporary home was destroyed in a US bombing raid and they had crossed the border into Pakistan.

The US government understood almost immediately that they had been seized by mistake, but that did not prevent senior officials from allowing Chinese interrogators to visit them at Guantánamo, and, it seems, securing a guarantee in UN negotiations that China would not oppose the invasion of Iraq by designating a Uighur separatist group as a global terrorist organization.

Attempts to conveniently tie the Guantanamo Uighurs to this group came unstuck in June 2008, when a US court derided the government’s supposed evidence as being akin to a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but it was not until October 2008 that the government finally abandoned all claims that the men were “enemy combatants.” That month, their habeas corpus petition finally reached Judge Ricardo Urbina, in the District Court in Washington D.C., who ordered their release into the United States, pointing out that holding innocent men was unconstitutional.

The Bush administration appealed, and the appeal was approved in February 2009 by the notoriously right-wing Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, who ruled (with the blessing, sadly, of President Obama’s Justice Department), that matters of immigration were to be decided by the Executive and not the courts, thereby gutting the men’s habeas victory of any practical meaning.

After Greg Craig’s honorable plan to rehouse two of the men in the US was scrapped, Daniel Fried was obliged to undertake numerous missions to persuade other countries to offer them new homes. Fried eventually persuaded Bermuda and the Pacific island of Palau to take ten of the men, but Arkin Mahmud and Bahtiyar Mahnut in particular remained a problem. Palau had refused to offer a new home to Mahmud, who had developed mental health problems in Guantanamo, and, in solidarity, his brother, who had been offered a new home, turned down the offer, preferring to stay with his brother in Guantánamo instead.

An appeal to the government by the Washington Post, asking that the men be allowed into the US, was subsequently ignored, but it seemed that Obama was on a collision course with the Supreme Court, which accepted the men’s case last October, until Switzerland obligingly offered the men a new home in January this year.

As Arkin Mahmud and Bahtiyar Mahnut begin their new lives in Switzerland, five Uighurs remain in Guantánamo, but their fate is unknown. The Supreme Court refused to proceed with their case at the start of this month (although they did vacate the terrible Court of Appeals ruling), essentially because the five remaining men had also been offered new homes in Palau, but had turned them down, and it remains to be seen if Palau will renew its offer, if another country will rescue them from their seemingly endless ordeal, or if the lower courts will, once more, attempt to order their release into the United States.

A Libyan refugee released in Georgia

Announcing the release of the other three men from Guantánamo, the Justice Department refused to reveal their identities, but Candace Gorman, the indefatigable attorney representing Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, a Libyan, revealed that one of the three is her client, and it appears that the second man is also Libyan, and that the third is from an unidentified country in the Middle East (perhaps Libya, again, or Syria or Tunisia).

The release of Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi brings to an end another of Guantánamo’s many particularly bleak stories. A refugee from Libya, al-Ghizzawi had settled in Afghanistan in the 1990s, where he married an Afghan woman and had a child. Together, he and his wife ran a small bakery in Jalalabad, but after the US-led invasion, hearing that Arabs were being targeted, he decided to seek refuge with his in-laws in his wife’s home village. There, however, he was seized by bounty hunters and sold to US forces.

In Guantánamo, al-Ghizzawi suffered horribly. Afflicted with tuberculosis and hepatitis B, he nevertheless received little or no treatment, in common with the majority of those with medical problems, whose treatment was dependent on cooperation with their interrogators. In practical terms, what this meant for innocent men like al-Ghizzawi was that they would not be treated unless they provided false confessions to their interrogators, which could be used to justify their own detention, or the detention of others identified in these false confessions.

Al-Ghizzawi’s case is also notorious in terms of the warped review processes masquerading as justice at Guantánamo, as was revealed in 2007 by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence who had been involved in compiling the information used as evidence in the Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo in 2004-05. In an affidavit filed in a case submitted to the Supreme Court, Lt. Col. Abraham explained how the tribunal system, designed to review the prisoners’ cases to ascertain whether they had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants,” who could be held indefinitely, was a sham, and that the information used consisted of intelligence “of a generalized nature — often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status.”

Lt. Col. Abraham also explained how he had taken part in one of the tribunals, and, with his fellow officers, had concluded that the government had failed to establish that the prisoner before them had any connection whatsoever to al-Qaeda or the Taliban for the very reasons described above. That prisoner was Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, and, as Lt. Col. Abraham added, the authorities refused to accept the tribunal’s decision, dismissing all three officers, and conducting a second tribunal that reached the conclusion the government wanted; namely, that al-Ghizzawi was an “enemy combatant,” and that he could continue to be held indefinitely. This was not the only “do-over” tribunal, but the fact that it happened at all is a disgrace, and the fact that al-Ghizzawi continued to be held for another six years after Lt. Col. Abraham exposed the shortcomings in the government’s so-called evidence is a disturbingly clear example of the complete disregard for any notions of justice or decency in the running of Guantánamo.

It was not until June last year that al-Ghizzawi was finally cleared for release by the interagency Task Force established by President Obama to review all the Guantánamo cases, and even then the Justice Department behaved appallingly, neglecting to inform Candace Gorman of the decision and then gagging her when she tried to inform al-Ghizzawi’s family, and his wife, who, in despair after years of waiting, had decided to seek a divorce.

Unprincipled obstacles to the closure of Guantánamo

I have no idea if the identities of the other two men released in Georgia will be made available, but it is clear that they too have been deprived of their freedom for up to eight years not as a result of any coherent policy, but as a direct result of the Bush administration’s arrogance and incompetence in establishing Guantánamo as a prison outside the law filled largely with men who were seized and sold to US forces by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, and who had no connection whatsoever to al-Qaeda, the 9/11 attacks, or any other group involved in international terrorism.

With 183 prisoners still at Guantánamo, and 101 of these cleared for release by Obama’s Task Force, and, in some cases, by the US courts, the shrill rhetoric of those who still insist that the prison is full of terrorists should have been silenced, but as the cynical fearmongering of recent months has shown all too clearly, when it comes to Guantánamo, Republican lawmakers are more than happy to stir up unsubstantiated hysteria about the prison, playing the fear card as the mid-term elections approach, and encouraging Democrats to do the same.

I have my doubts that the other 82 men qualify as terrorists, but presume that the 35 proposed for trials (either in federal courts or in Military Commissions) will one day have their cases considered by a judge and jury, and that the other 47 men, who the Task Force recommended be held indefinitely without charge or trial, will be able to challenge this deeply distressing advice in a US court, before judges reviewing their habeas corpus petitions. As with 34 of the 46 cases so far decided, the judges will, no doubt, conclude that, in many of these cases, the government’s assertions that they are too dangerous to release, despite a lack of usable evidence, will be revealed as distortions based on the kind of false confessions that Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi resisted making in exchange for medical treatment.

For now, however, while readers should bear in mind that only between 5 and 10 percent of the total number of prisoners held at Guantánamo will, in the end, be judged to have had any connection to al-Qaeda or the Taliban, the release of these five prisoners to Switzerland and Georgia continues to demonstrate that innocent men are still held at Guantánamo, and that the fearmongering in the US is both unjustifiable and potentially damaging to these men’s prospects of being rehoused elsewhere.

Given these obstacles — and lawmakers’ refusal to accept any cleared prisoners into the US — Daniel Fried is to be congratulated for successfully concluding the complex negotiations leading to the release of these men, and, sometimes single-handedly, it seems, working towards the closure of Guantánamo, which remains a stain on America’s reputation, and a dark symbol of the Bush administration policies that Obama has found himself unwilling, or unable to thoroughly repudiate.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Truthout. Digg the original here.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 52 prisoners released from February 2009 to February 2010, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 3 prisoners of undisclosed nationality to Slovakia, 1 unidentified Uzbek to Switzerland; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain.

I also reproduce another article, published on today on EurasiaNet, written by Molly Corso, a freelance reporter based in Tbilisi. Molly interviewed me back in October last year, when it was first indicated that Georgia would accept prisoners from Guantánamo, and her latest article provides some updates, and also includes information I provided during a telephone interview on Monday.

Georgia Helps Close Guantánamo
By Ketevan Khachidze, Lizaveta Zhahanina, The Georgian Times, March 29, 2010

The transfer of three Guantánamo Bay prison inmates to Georgia has sparked controversy in Georgia. The Government has justified the move by saying it is part of the strategic relationship between Georgia and the US. Some opposition groups however have denounced the lack of clarity on the issue and voiced security concerns.

According to the Georgian Interior Ministry, the Guantánamo inmates arrived on Tuesday and will live in Georgia freely under the control of law enforcement bodies. They will not be allowed to leave the country.

The Obama Administration had pledged to close the Guantánamo prison by January 2010 but as the Western media noted missed the deadline due to a difficulty in finding countries which would host the prisoners.

In a statement released on Tuesday the Justice Department thanked Georgia for making its task easier: “The United States is grateful to Georgia for its willingness to support US efforts to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility.”

The nationalities of the inmates have been kept secret for security reasons but the Georgian authorities said they come from the Middle East. An Interior Ministry spokesperson said that the transfer was made after the Ministry of Foreign Affairs exchanged notes with the US State Department.

Strategic allies

The August 2008 war created a big headache for the US, which had to stand by Tbilisi in its official rhetoric at least. Many analysts note that Georgia is now trying to prove it is still an asset for Washington rather than a liability. Georgia has become the highest per capita troop contributor to NATO’s operation in Afghanistan for the same reason and this is primarily why Georgia is accepting the Guantánamo inmates today.

Davit Darchiashvili, Chair of the Parliamentary Committee for European Integration, said that the decision carries serious political importance as “strategic partnership between countries is always a two-way process.”

“If a big part of [the Government’s message] is that we have a special relationship with the United States, you have to be able to demonstrate that. This is one way to do it,” Lincoln Mitchell, an Assistant Professor of International Politics at New York’s Columbia University, was quoted as saying by EurasiaNet.

Security risks?

Senior Interior Ministry official Shota Utiashvili said the presence of former terror suspects does not pose any threat to civilians. “We have carefully examined their profiles and are confident that they will not create any dangers. Many countries have received Guantánamo prisoners and there has not been a single case in which these prisoners have violated the laws of their host countries,” Utiashvili said.

Pro-Western opposition leader Irakli Alasania also brushed off concerns that the inmates pose security threats to the country but was not happy with the Government’s explanations. “I don’t think the transfer of the three former prisoners is dangerous for the country. However, the Government is obliged to give clear explanations regarding this, and take relevant security measures,” Alasania told journalists.

Other opposition figures were more critical. MP Gia Tsagareishvili says the explanations given by Government officials leave the public unable to assess the risks involved in the transfer. “If the risks were assessed by National Security Council Secretary Eka Tkeshelashvili, I do not believe they are reliable. She has held too many positions, and during the August war we all saw her skill at risk assessments,” Tsagareishvili said.

Andy Worthington is among those who believes that the transfer of former terror suspects would not jeopardize Georgia’s security. He is a British journalist and author of three books, including The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

“There is absolutely no reason to worry whatsoever. The men who have been released have been cleared on two or three occasions in the United States. The Obama administration has been very careful about making sure that it does not release anybody who may constitute any kind of a threat,” he said in a phone interview with GT on Saturday.

Moreover, Andy Worthington believes that Georgia should be commended for what he calls “a humanitarian gesture” and joining the club of all those countries who help close Guantánamo.

The Prisoner’s Story: from Libya to Guantánamo

Andy Worthington said he knows the story of one of the inmates who was transferred to Georgia from the prisoner’s lawyer. His name is Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi and he comes from Libya.

“He is a Libyan who had travelled to Afghanistan in the 1980 to fight against the Soviet Union. But after that he settled in Afghanistan, he married an Afghan woman and had a child. He and his wife were running a bakery in Jalalabad at the time of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. He heard that Arabs were being targeted. So, he thought it was better to move to his wife’s family’s village where his wife’s mother and father lived. He thought he would be safer there. But he was captured by bounty hunters and he was sold to the United States and he ended up in Guantánamo.

“Now in 2004 in Guantánamo they held what were called Combatant Status Review Tribunals. They were tribunals of military officers who looked at what the government claimed was the evidence against the prisoners and decided whether they should still be held as enemy combatants, as men who could be held indefinitely. In that tribunal the three men who looked at Mr. al-Ghizzawi’s case said there is no case against this man. We know this because one of the men, Lieutenant Colonel Steven Abraham, said they did not use anything that rose to the level of evidence and should have let him go. He later submitted a document that went to the Supreme Court in which he explained essentially how the tribunals at Guantánamo were a sham process. Two other American officers [also] said there was no reason to continue holding this man [in custody].

“What happened was that the government dismissed them, set up another tribunal and told these officers to change the opinion. So, it convened another tribunal to get the right answer … So, essentially, there was never any reason to hold this man. He was somebody who was picked up and was sold to the Americans because the Americans were offering bounty payments averaging $5,000 a head for people who could be dressed up as al-Qaeda or the Taliban and Mr. Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi fitted this picture, he was an Arab living in Afghanistan. The fact is that he had not been involved in any fighting for over ten years, and when he had been, he had been fighting against the Soviet Union.”

Georgia Officials Say Guantánamo Prisoners Pose No Threat
By Molly Corso, Eurasianet, March 30, 2010

Eager to demonstrate its reliability as Washington’s strategic partner, the Georgian government is downplaying security concerns about three former prisoners dispatched from the United States’ Guantánamo Bay prison to Georgia.

US President Barack Obama’s administration has been under ongoing pressure to find new homes for prisoners housed at the US-run Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba after pledging to close the facility by January 2010. Over 180 prisoners remain in limbo.

Georgian opposition groups have raised concerns about potential risks from Tbilisi’s willingness to help house former Guantánamo detainees, but ruling party politicians and government officials have brushed aside worries that the three men pose any security threat.

“The Georgian government made the decision to accept several detainees as part of our strategic partnership with the United States,” Deputy Parliamentary Speaker Gigi Tsereteli commented to EurasiaNet.org. “Three or four people is [sic] not any threat for the Georgian state.” One senior Ministry of Internal Affairs official underlined that the trio will live “normal lives” in their host country.

A special group of ministry representatives traveled to the Guantánamo prison in December 2009 to interview possible detainees for relocation, said Shota Utiashvili, head of the ministry’s analytical department. The Georgian government was satisfied that the men are not dangerous, although wanted to confirm that they were not “psychologically damaged,” he added. The men have already contacted their families, and are free to bring them to Georgia if they wish, Utiashvili continued.

The men are currently housed in Tbilisi and have been provided with language tutors to help them learn Georgian. Utiashvili said that the Georgian government is not paying for the men’s accommodations or needs, but would not elaborate about who is covering the cost of their care. He would not identify any of the ex-prisoners.

The US attorney for one of the men, however, maintains that he is far from being a terrorist. In March 23 comments posted on her blog, Chicago-based attorney H. Candace Gorman identified one of the transferred prisoners as Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi. In published interviews, Gorman has described al-Ghizzawi as a Libyan baker in his mid-40s with an Afghan wife and small daughter. He allegedly fled Libya for Afghanistan in the 1980s, and opened a spice shop and bakery.

His story appears to be well known among anti-Guantánamo activists like British journalist and filmmaker Andy Worthington, who has made a documentary about the prison. Worthington claims that al-Ghizzawi was among scores of Arab nationals scooped up by bounty hunters looking to trade alleged al-Qaeda sympathizers for cash. Al-Ghizzawi was declared innocent by a military tribunal in 2004, but was not released [because a second tribunal was convened, which reversed that opinion -- see above]. Attorney Gorman writes on her blog that he suffered health problems while in prison and was often in solitary confinement.

Utiashvili would not confirm or deny that al-Ghizzawi is one of the three former Guantánamo prisoners sent to Georgia.

Opposition figures like Irakli Alasania, Georgia’s former ambassador to the United Nations, have called for greater transparency about the transfer. Discussions about such a transfer were ongoing as of late autumn 2009, according to Georgian government statements made to EurasiaNet.org. But filmmaker Worthington noted that it is often in the men’s best interests not to be identified. Family members at home could face retribution, he said.

Another concern is the reaction in the host country. Detainees face “almost complete ignorance about any of the details of Guantánamo” in any host country, which can lead to misperceptions by the local population, Worthington claimed.

So far, however, ordinary Georgians, long used to riding the waves of larger powers’ foreign policies, appear to have responded to the trio’s arrival with equanimity. The three men have, in fact, already contributed to the country’s rich culture of self-deprecating jokes.

A cartoon published on March 29 by the weekly newspaper Kviris Palitra illustrated their reaction to being transferred to Georgia, a country still struggling to recover from the 2008 war with Russia and years of economic decline. Lament the men: “But we didn’t harm (America) that much!”

POSTSCRIPT/CORRECTION: Candace Gorman informs me that the US authorities never even attempted to back up its claim, mentioned many years ago in one of its “Summaries of Unclassified Evidence,” that Mr. al-Ghizzawi had been “encouraged to go to Afghanistan to fight with the Mujahideen,” and had “moved to Pakistan to take up the Afghan case.” In the fog of allegations masquerading as evidence, I’m sorry to report that I had given weight to this allegation, whereas it appears that Mr. al-Ghizzawi was, in fact, nothing more than a refugee from Libya who had settled in Afghanistan.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.