Speaking to AFP reporter Mustafa Haji Abdinur in a hotel in Bare’s home town of Hargeisa, the capital of the northern breakaway state of Somaliland, Bare declared, “Guantánamo Bay is like hell on Earth.” He added, “I don’t feel normal yet but I thank Allah for keeping me alive and free from the physical and mental sufferings of some of my friends. Some of my colleagues in the prison lost their sight, some lost their limbs and others ended up mentally disturbed. I’m OK compared to them.”

Bare told Abdinur that he was “in good physical health,” but the reporter explained that the 44-year old “looks dazed, speaks very softly and walks gingerly.”

After explaining that, at the time he was seized, he had been in Pakistan for many years “with several relatives who had fled the violence in Somalia and were hoping to find asylum in a western state,” he stated that he was held in Pakistan for about four months, and then transferred to US custody in Afghanistan.

“At Bagram and Kandahar, the situation was harsh but when we were transferred to Guantánamo the torture tactics changed,” he explained. “They use a kind of psychological torture that kills you mentally.” This, he added, “included depriving prisoners of sleep for at least four nights in a row and feeding them once a day with only a biscuit.” He also explained, “And in the cold they let you sleep without a blanket. Some of the inmates face harsher torture, including with electricity and beating.”

Abdinur noted that Bare was “reluctant to answer questions about his alleged ties with Al-Ittihad Al-Islamiya, a Somali Islamist movement which produced many of the current leaders of the Al Qaeda-linked Shebab,” which was, I think, understandable given that he had finally been released after eight years’ detention without charge or trial by the US authorities, who would not have done so had there been any evidence of such an involvement.

In response to the questioning, he stated instead, “Guantánamo is a place of humiliation for Muslims. All the inmates are Muslims but they (Americans) claim the prison is for terrorists. Why don’t they arrest non-Muslims belonging to these so-called terror groups?”

He also stated, “No human rights convention stands in Guantánamo. Interrogators force inmates to confess crimes they didn’t commit by torturing them and sullying their religion. They would throw Korans into the toilet and raise the volume of their music during prayers.”

In conclusion, he explained that the US authorities had “never told him why he was arrested,” stating, “They used to ask many questions, most of them relating to my background like what I was doing in Somalia and about the people I know. It was all about suspicions and not a clear case.”

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, published in March 2009, 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.

Rosenberg reported that the two men “were processed by the Somaliland government and then released to rejoin their families in Hargeisa,” the capital of “the breakaway region in northern Somalia that has its own autonomous government.” She added, “The United States does not recognize the government in Somaliland and there were no official statements on how Arale and Barre arrived there. A local newspaper, the Somaliland Press, said they arrived aboard a jet provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross, suggesting that the United States had released the men to the Red Cross in a third country.”

As President Obama attempts to close Guantánamo, with the administration recently announcing its intention of purchasing a prison in Illinois to hold some of the prisoners, the release of these two men — as with the overwhelming majority of releases from Guantánamo — yet again demonstrates how hysterical and unsubstantiated are Republican claims that Guantánamo is full of hardcore terrorists, as their stories demonstrate:

Seized in Pakistan: Mohammed Sulaymon Barre

Mohammed Sulaymon Barre, who was 37 years old at the time of his capture, was one of the first men to be seized in the “War on Terror.” As I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files, he had been living in Pakistan as a UN-approved refugee since fleeing his homeland during its ruinous civil war in the early 1990s, and was seized at his home in Karachi on November 1, 2001 “by police and intelligence agents who had made two previous visits to check his papers, and who seem, therefore, to have seized him on this third occasion because they were looking for easy targets to hand over to the Americans.”

As I also explained in The Guantánamo Files:

Barre worked from his home as the Karachi agent for the Dahabshiil Company, a Somali organization with branches around the world, which provides essential money transfer operations for the Somali diaspora. According to the Americans, Dahabshiil was “closely related to al-Barakat, a Somali financial company designated as a terrorism finance facilitator,” [which had been added to a US terrorism watch list and had its assets frozen]. Barre said that he knew nothing about this allegation, pointing out that his job only involved making small transactions on behalf of Somalis living in Pakistan.

In fact, as was noted in a report in 2004 [for a UN conference on Trade and Development], the enforced US-led closure of money transfer operations with suspected links to terrorism was “disastrous for Somalia, a country with no recognized government and without a functioning state apparatus. After the international community largely washed its hands of the country following the disastrous peacekeeping foray in 1994, remittances became the inhabitants’ lifeline. With no recognized private banking system, the remittance trade was dominated by a single firm (al-Barakat).” Crucially, the report added that, although the US authorities closed down al-Barakat in 2001, labeling it “the quartermasters of terror,” only four criminal prosecutions had been filed by 2003, “and none involved charges of aiding terrorists.”

Nevertheless, the authorities at Guantánamo — operating in a bubble of terror-related allegations that largely bore no relation to the realities of the outside world — had no time for Barre’s protestations of innocence. “I am convinced that your branch of the Dahabshiil company was used to transfer money for terrorism,” the presiding officer of his tribunal at Guantánamo told Barre in 2005. “What I am trying to find out is if you think maybe there were some people that were using your company and using your branch to transfer money, or whether you were just totally not paying attention.”

A year later, as the BBC reported in August 2006, al-Barakat had been removed from the US watchlist of terrorist organizations. The report explained that al-Barakat had been included on the watchlist because US intelligence analysts thought it had been used to finance the 9/11 hijackers, but the 9/11 Commission had investigated the claim and had found it baseless. In February 2009, in a report for the Washington Post, Peter Finn noted that, in the allegations against Barre at Guantánamo, Dahabshiil’s alleged ties to al-Barakat had been dropped by 2006, although even then the taint of the allegation was not entirely removed.

In a letter to the Post, an attorney for Dahabshiil was obliged to point out that the firm has “never been the subject of any investigation in relation to alleged terrorist funding” and that it “has no involvement whatsoever with money laundering or the funding or of terrorist organizations and … places the highest importance on money laundering compliance.” As the Post noted ruefully, “Dahabshiil should have been given an opportunity to comment for the article.”

Shorn of this central allegation, it is no wonder that, as Barre’s lawyers explained in a court filing in connection with his habeas corpus petition, the allegations against him have “varied dramatically.” In 2006, for example, presumably through a false allegation coerced from some other prisoner, the authorities claimed that he was not in Pakistan in 1994 and 1995 — despite the existence of UN papers documenting his meetings in Pakistan in those years — but was actually working in Osama bin Laden’s compound in Khartoum, Sudan, an allegation so worthless that his lawyers described it as “implausible and unsubstantiated.”

According to Emi MacLean of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents Barre, most of his problems at Guantánamo stemmed from his opposition to the regime at prison, and his involvement in several hunger strikes. “If you were detained for seven years without charge and any fair process, you might be engaged in activities that would be considered disciplinary violations that are really protests for your detention,” she said.

The truth, as Barre himself noted at his tribunal in 2005, was that “A lot of interrogators said to me that … a lot of mistakes were made and they must be corrected. They told me many times that I am here by mistake.” Sadly, this was not enough to prevent him from suffering in Guantánamo, and also in US custody in Bagram before his transfer to Guantánamo in 2002, when, as he explained in his tribunal:

They interrogated me and one of the interrogators told me I was from al-Wafa [a Saudi charity that was also regarded with suspicion by the US authorities] and I needed to confess to that. You have no choice. I told them it wasn’t true. They pressured me. They whispered something then spoke to the guard. The guard came in, grabbed me by my neck and threw me. He took me in a bad way to isolation. All my blankets, except one, were taken from me. It was freezing cold. They didn’t feed me lunch and sometimes they didn’t feed me twice. At night it is very cold and if you don’t eat dinner it gets colder. This torture lasted fifteen to twenty days. My feet and hands were swollen. I wasn’t able to stand because I was in so much pain. I asked for treatment and an interrogator brought a nurse and asked if I wanted treatment. They told me they could cut my legs to stop the pain. They did this so I would confess to the accusations that I didn’t do. Nothing happened. After the torture ended, I met another interrogator who told me injustice was done to me and I didn’t have anything to do with this. He said he would do a report so I could go home. He told me I would be released. Suddenly, I was taken back to Kandahar and then to Cuba.

Seized in Djibouti: Ismail Mahmoud Muhammad

Unlike Mohammed Sulaymon Barre, Ismail Mahmoud Muhammad was one of the last prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo, one of just six men flown to the prison after the arrival of 14 “high-value detainees” in September 2006. Identified by the Pentagon as Abdullahi Sudi Arale, he arrived with little fanfare in June 2007, and, as I explained in an article in September 2007:

Possibly … his arrival was little trumpeted because it involved the deliberately under-reported “War on al-Qaeda” in the Horn of Africa, and because the administration had very little information to offer about him. In almost questioning terms, Arale was described as a “suspected” member of “the al-Qaeda terrorist network in East Africa,” who served as “a courier between East Africa al-Qaeda (EAAQ) and al-Qaeda in Pakistan.”

In a press release, the DoD added that, after returning to Somalia from Pakistan in September 2006, he “held a leadership role in the EAAQ-affiliated Somali Council of Islamic Courts (CIC),” and noted, with distressing vagueness, that there was “significant information available” to indicate that Arale had been “assisting various EAAQ-affiliated extremists in acquiring weapons and explosives,” that he had “facilitated terrorist travel by providing false documents for AQ and EAAQ-affiliates and foreign fighters traveling into Somalia,” and that he had “played a significant role in the re-emergence of the CIC in Mogadishu.” Unmentioned, of course, was the subtext of the situation in Somalia: the role of the CIC in returning some semblance of order to one of the world’s least-governed countries, and the US government’s use of Ethiopia as a proxy army in yet another secret, dirty war.

It took some time for the truth about the Pentagon’s “distressing vagueness” to be explained, in part because the US authorities released no further information about him, and, in two and a half years, do not appear to have conducted a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, to ascertain whether he was correctly designated as an “enemy combatant.” However, when Reprieve, the legal action charity whose lawyers represent dozens of Guantánamo prisoners, became involved, another narrative emerged, in which Muhammad not only had no connection to al-Qaeda, but was, in fact, “an English teacher and centrist political activist.”

Born in Mogadishu in 1970, Muhammad had remained in the capital throughout the civil war of the 1990s until the security situation deteriorated to such an extent that he moved north to Somaliland, establishing the first English school in the new country, and working as a journalist. In 1998, he traveled to Pakistan, where he studied English Literature at the International Islamic University, and became, as Reprieve described it, “a respected leader of the Somali community in the country.”

When his father died, he moved back to Mogadishu, “where the rule of the Union of Islamic Courts had brought relative stability to the war-torn capital,” but at the end of 2006, when, backed by the US, the Ethiopian Army invaded, he moved north one more. Opposed to the Ethiopian invasion, he was asked, “as a respected member of the community … to attend a conference in Eritrea aimed at organizing a political campaign” to ensure that the Ethiopians left.

It was while he was on his way to this conference that he was seized by local police in Djibouti, “apparently at the behest of the Americans.” Handed over to the US military, he was taken to Camp Lemonier, the US military base that played a key role in American interference in the Horn of Africa, where other prisoners have been held, possibly including an unknown number of “ghost prisoners.” There, as Reprieve explained, “he was held in a shipping container and interrogated by Americans.”

Compared to Mohammed Sulaymon Barre, Ismael Mahmoud Muhammad was fortunate that his wrongful imprisonment lasted for only two and a half years, but as the eighth anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo approaches, the release of these two men — neither of whom was cleared until the Obama administration’s inter-agency Task Force began its deliberations this year — demonstrates, yet again, that, when it comes to undoing the shameful legacy of Guantánamo, much work still remains to be done.

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, published in March 2009, 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 on the Huffington Post. Cross-posted on The Public Record, Common Dreams and Axis of Logic.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 30 prisoners released from February to early December 2009, 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).

Behind the rhetoric, few commentators spare a thought for the victims of this sustained example of lawlessness, stupidity and cruelty, most of whom are still held in crushing isolation for 22 or 23 hours a day, despite never being charged or tried for any crime.

On the eve of the Presidential election, three prisoners — one from Kazakhstan, one from Tajikistan and one from Somaliland — were released from Guantánamo, and their stories neatly encapsulate many of the chronic failures relating to the prisoners’ initial arrest and detention that still plague the prison as the new administration begins considering how to shut it down.

The teenager from Kazakhstan

The last of four Kazakhs in Guantánamo, Abdulrahim Kerimbakiev was seized by Northern Alliance soldiers in a house raid in Kabul in December 2001, along with two compatriots from his home village. He was 18 years old at the time, as was one of his companions, Abdullah Magrupov, who had only been at the house for five days, after studying at a madrassa in Karachi. At his tribunal in Guantánamo, Magrupov said that they were captured by a Northern Alliance commander, who held them in “some kind of huge container” and “a place like a barn,” before transferring them to US custody.

During his tribunal, Kerimbakiev explained that he had traveled to Afghanistan in 2000 with ten family members, including his grandmother, his mother, and his sisters and brothers, but what interested the US authorities was his alleged status as a cook for the Taliban. Kerimbakiev denied the allegations, saying that he lived a simple life in a house in Kabul, where he spent most of his time growing vegetables. This was difficult for his tribunal to accept, and prompted one of its members to say, “We’re trying to understand why you’re here. The United States wouldn’t detain someone for more than two years for simply growing vegetables. Can you help us understand?”

Although it was quite possible to be imprisoned for growing vegetables, Kerimbakiev explained that the other man captured with him, Yakub Abahanov, “was a cook for the [Taliban] back-up forces,” and it seems likely, therefore, that Kerimbakiev was actually growing vegetables for the Taliban — although none of this explains why a teenager scraping a meager living from feeding the troops of the Afghan government should be transported halfway around the world to spend the next seven years of his life in a prison for terror suspects. Nevertheless, while Abdullah Magrupov and Yakub Abahanov were released in December 2006, Abdulrahim Kerimbakiev’s perceived lies led to him being held for another 23 months.

A 63-year old Somali refugee

The story of Mohammed Hussein Abdallah, a father of eleven who was 57 years old when he was dragged from his house in Peshawar, Pakistan, and transported to Guantánamo, is no less shocking. If Abdulrahim Kerimbakiev’s experience indicates misplaced zeal on the part of the United States’ Afghan allies, Mohammed Abdallah’s demonstrates similar failings on the part of the Pakistani authorities and the US agents who were advising them.

Mohammed Abdallah is one of dozens of Guantánamo prisoners seized in house raids in Pakistan — mostly between January and July 2002 — who were working for Gulf-based charities, which, in the eyes of the US authorities, were fronts for terrorist activities. The pursuit of these organizations began after Paul O’Neill, the Secretary of the US Treasury, blacklisted two organizations: the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS), a Kuwait-based NGO, with branches around the world, whose stated aim was “to improve the condition of the Muslim community and develop an awareness and understanding of Islam amongst the non-Muslim communities, by concentrating on youth and education,” and the Afghan Support Committee (ASC), which, according to the US Treasury, had been established by Osama bin Laden in the 1980s.

In a statement, Paul O’Neill claimed that personnel in both groups, including two alleged directors, Abu Bakr al-Jaziri and Abdul Muhsin al-Libi, “defrauded well-meaning contributors by diverting money donated for widows and orphans to al-Qaeda terrorists.” This may or may not have been the case, but al-Jaziri and al-Libi were never caught, and those who took the blame instead were the organizations’ innocent workers, who were responsible for the lion’s share of their charitable work, which included running schools and orphanages, drilling wells and building mosques.

On 27 May 2002, five members of RIHS — one Jordanian and four Sudanese — were seized in house raids in Peshawar, and transported to Guantánamo. All were subsequently released (between November 2003 and December 2007), but one of them, Hamad Gadallah, an accountant who clearly impressed his tribunal with his descriptions of a competent and principled organization that “had nothing to do with any terrorist acts,” explained that his downstairs neighbour, Abu Mohammed — a teacher from Algeria who did not work for the RIHS — was arrested on the same day. This was indeed the case, but what Gadallah did not know was that two other teachers were also seized on the same day: Menhal al-Henali (a Syrian, who was released in November 2003), and Mohammed Hussein Abdallah.

In Guantánamo, Abu Mohammed (who was released in November 2006, but was sent to Albania because of fears that he would be tortured in his home country) explained how the three men used to travel to work together in a bus that was provided for the teachers, and Abdallah expanded on the story during his tribunal.

Refuting an allegation that he was “arrested in a raid on suspected al-Qaeda residences and support facilities connected to the Afghan Support Committee,” he pointed out that he had lived in Peshawar under UN refugee status since 1993, had never worked for the ASC, and had spent the two years prior to his capture teaching orphans in a Red Crescent school. He said that he rented a house where he lived with one of his daughters and her family, and denied having anything to do with any kind of terrorist organization. “If there is anybody here that should be called a terrorist,” he said, “it should be the people that came to my house that took me at two o’clock in the morning in front of my children and grandchildren. The women were crying and the children were terrorized, crying and screaming.” Called as a witness during his hearing, Abu Mohammed described Abdallah as “basically a family man [who] just goes from home to work and does not really associate with people, period. Very rarely do you see him with other people.”

The taxi driver from Tajikistan

The released Tajik, Zainulabidin Merozhev, was a relatively late arrival at Guantánamo. Seized by US forces in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif on July 3, 2003, when he was 25 years old, he was identified as “Jumma Jan,” and was accused, in Guantánamo, of being a high-ranking Taliban member, who “reportedly was assigned a mission in Tajikistan after 11 September 2001 as part of an al-Qaeda and Taliban operational plan.” It was also alleged that he had a “leadership role” in a rocket attack on US forces at the airfield in Mazar-e-Sharif, that he was “implicated” in an assassination attempt on General Dostum, one of the leaders of the Northern Alliance, and that he was a commander in Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), a ferociously anti-American militia controlled by the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (who, ironically, was one the major beneficiaries of US backing during the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation in the 1980s).

In response, Merozhev, who had probably been identified by opportunistic US allies, availing themselves of the substantial bounty rewards available for “al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects,” explained that he was not “Jumma Jan,” and was nothing more than refugee from Tajikistan who had worked as a driver. He said that he had arrived in Afghanistan with his family as a refugee during the civil war in Tajikistan, when he was a teenager, and had then traveled to Pakistan, where he received an education.

Unfortunately, he then contracted tuberculosis, but when he tried to return to Tajikistan, he was befriended by an “Afghanistan gentleman” who provided him with a car, so that he could earn money as a taxi driver to pay for his medical treatment. He admitted that, during this period, at the end of the 1990s, he had also used the car to drive around a Taliban leader called Guli, a double amputee responsible for security, but he insisted that he only took the job because he needed the money to continue his treatment, and pointed out that before his capture he had spent several years driving a tractor and a bus.

The reality of Merozhev’s tuberculosis was apparently not in doubt, as he stated that he had received treatment in US custody — for four months at Bagram airbase, and for seven months in Guantánamo — where, he said, he had spent 48 days in an isolation ward, but it remains unclear why he was held for so long. As he explained in a review board in 2005, “Since I have been here in Cuba, they have just interrogated me for less than twenty minutes, once, only once. I don’t know how these accusations have come about. I have been here for one and a half years and only one time have they interrogated me.”

The fate that awaits Merozhev in Tajikistan is impossible to gauge. Although some of the eight Tajiks released from Guantánamo between November 2003 and March 2007 were freed without charge on their return home, two of the three prisoners released last March were subsequently put on trial and sentenced to 17 years’ imprisonment in “high-security penal colonies” (labor camps) for “serving as mercenaries in Afghanistan” — where they were accused of aiding the Taliban by fighting for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) — and for taking part in “illegal border crossing.” After passing sentence, the judge announced that both men had maintained their innocence, and added, “In their last words, they said they didn’t expect such consequences for acts they committed.”

This was clearly something of an understatement, but while the Pentagon has no doubt been using their sentences as part of an unprincipled attempt to justify its detention policies, other observers might be more tempted to conclude that they simply exchanged one form of arbitrary imprisonment for another, and to focus on the stories of Abdulrahim Kerimbakiev, Mohammed Hussein Abdallah and Zainulabidin Merozhev as more representative of caliber of prisoners swept up in one of the most ill-conceived dragnets ever launched by a democratic country.

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 also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

This article, which draws on passages from The Guantánamo Files, was published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Note:

The prisoners’ numbers (and variations on the spelling of their names) are as follows:

ISN 521: Abdulrahim Kerimbakiev (Kazakh)
ISN 704: Mohammed Hussein Abdallah (Somali)
ISN 1095: Zainulabidin Merozhev (Jumma Jan) (Tajik)

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the eleven prisoners released from February to June 2009, 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 –- 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, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here).