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).

A Holiday Reunion
By Kevin Cullen

A while back, Michael Mone Jr., a Boston lawyer, flew down to Cuba to prepare a client for life after eight years locked up in Guantánamo.

“I think I would like to go to Texas,” Oybek Jabbarov said.

Mone looked at his client and said, “I don’t think they’re going to let you go to Texas.”

One of the guards at Guantánamo was a friendly soldier from Texas who had somehow convinced Jabbarov he’d be just another good ol’ boy from Uzbekistan if he resettled in Texas.

Mone and his dad, a great lawyer named Michael Mone Sr., had other ideas.

Their forebears came from Ireland and the Irish were among the few who backed up calls for Guantánamo to be closed with a pledge to take in released detainees.

Oybek Jabbarov was a refugee, looking for work and a way to get his pregnant wife and 2-year-old son down to Kabul, when a pair of Afghan mercenaries found him sitting in a teahouse.

US forces in Afghanistan were handing out bounties for “foreign fighters” and Oybek fetched a healthy sum.

He was never charged with anything.

It took eight years to figure out that the only thing Jabbarov posed a threat to was the integrity of the Constitution.

Mike Mone Jr. convinced Jabbarov he would get a fresh start in Ireland.

Mone convinced the Irish government, too, and three months ago the plane touched down in Dublin.

Jabbarov had his freedom, a nice place to live. But he didn’t have his family.

“My wife,” he told Mike Mone Jr. “My sons. My sons.”

He had never seen his younger son.

The younger Mike Mone explained the situation to people in the Irish government, and he didn’t have to explain it twice.

They started looking for the family.

Jabbarov’s wife and kids had been moving around central Asia for years, trying to survive, trying to get him back.

There was the family friend who was in contact with the wife and sons, and he had a cellphone and Mone talked to him.

Then the Irish government talked to him.

The guy with the cellphone handed it to one of Jabbarov’s sons, the 10-year-old, and he asked his father in Ireland, “When will I see you?”

“Soon,” Jabbarov replied.

“When I see you,” the boy said, “will you have a bicycle for me?”

For the last two months, Jabbarov talked to his wife and sons every other day, and each time his son asked if he could have a bike.

Last week, the Irish government sent a plane for his family.

Jabbarov was outside the international arrivals gate at Dublin Airport, pacing.

The glass doors parted, with a whoosh.

He embraced his wife. He kissed his boys.

They drove back to their house in the west of Ireland, and when the boys walked in the front door they saw two shiny bicycles in the hallway.

The boys rode their bicycles under a dull Irish sky. Jabbarov texted his lawyer in Boston: Call me.

Mone’s phone call was answered by a little boy’s voice that asked, “Is this Mr. Michael?”

The conversation quickly shifted to laptop computers, with video and audio, and Mone sat in his 16th-floor office on Federal Street, watching two little boys squirm on their father’s lap.

“How is your wife?” Mone asked.

“She’s happy,” Jabbarov said, “but she doesn’t know how she can keep this big house clean.”

“My wife says the same thing,” Mone said.

Michael Mone Jr. was sitting there in his office, watching a father and two little boys 3,000 miles away make up for eight lost years and it dawned on him, this remarkable thing, this incredible thought: Christmas is for Muslims, too.

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.

The list is based on the deliberations of an interagency Task Force, established by President Obama on his second day in office, to determine who should be released, and who should continue to be held, and in my article I looked at the cases of 31 of the prisoners (26 Yemenis, three Saudis and two Kuwaitis, one of whom has since been released), pointing out that, in theory, there was no reason for them not be released immediately.

However, I also pointed out that members of Obama’s own administration had told the New York Times that the government was afraid of releasing the Yemenis (even though they had been cleared for release), because Guantánamo itself might have radicalized [them], exposing [them] to militants and embittering [them] against the United States,” and I should also have added, as former military defense attorney Maj. David Frakt pointed out to me in an email, that the men’s release is also dependent on the whims of Congress, where lawmakers “passed a law this summer that requires the administration to give Congress 15 days notice before releasing anyone from Guantánamo.”

Nevertheless, although Congressional obstruction may well be an additional complication (which I discussed in another article last week, “Lawyer Blasts ‘Congressional Depravity’ On Guantánamo”), it remains apparent that the route out of Guantánamo for these 30 men ought to be easier than it is for the other 44 prisoners cleared for release, as these are men who cannot be repatriated either because of fears that they will face torture or other ill-treatment (including arbitrary detention and show trials) on their return, or because (in the cases of two Palestinians) they are, effectively, stateless refugees.

Who are the 44 prisoners?

Of these 44 prisoners, 15 had their release ordered by judges in US District Courts, as a result of the habeas corpus petitions that were authorized by the Supreme Court in an extraordinarily important ruling in June 2008. 13 of these men are Uighurs — Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province, whose release was ordered by Judge Ricardo Urbina a year ago, and whose plight I have written about extensively (particularly here and here) — and the others are an Algerian, Sabir Lahmar, whose release was ordered last November, and Abdul Rahim al-Ginco, a young Syrian, tortured and imprisoned by al-Qaeda and the Taliban, whose release was ordered in June this year.

The other 29 are as follows: nine Tunisians, six more Algerians, three more Syrians, two Egyptians, two Uzbeks, two Palestinians, an Azerbaijani and a Tajik. Although their names have not been provided, the identities of the majority of these men can be deduced by a process of elimination (there are, for example, only two Egyptians, two Uzbeks, and one Azerbaijani in Guantánamo), and, in addition, the decision to release the Tajik prisoner, Umar Abdulayev, is known about because it was announced in July.

As I explained at the time, this decision was distressing to Abdulayev and his lawyers for two reasons: firstly, because when government lawyers announced that they would “no longer defend his detention,” they also announced that they “want[ed] US diplomats to arrange to repatriate him,” even though Abdulayev is terrified of returning to Tajikistan, because he was threatened by Tajik agents who visited him in Guantánamo; and secondly, because the Task Force’s decision also led the Justice Department to ask a judge to drop Abdulayev’s habeas petition, prompting his lawyers to point out that the Task Force’s decision was “not a determination that [Abdulayev’s] detention was or was not lawful,” and that it therefore “does nothing towards removing the stigma of being held in Guantánamo or being accused of being a terrorist by the United States.”

This is actually a widespread problem for those cleared for release who fear repatriation, not only because recent rulings by the Court of Appeals have removed a number of judicial safety nets established by judges to prevent the enforced repatriation of a number of prisoners in Guantánamo (for whom the “stigma” of “being accused of being a terrorist by the United States” is of grave importance), but also because, in a wider sense, the Obama administration is unwilling to state openly that any prisoner was seized by mistake (as one of the prisoners’ lawyers recently explained to me, no lawyer would advise admitting responsibility, as it would open the floodgate to compensation claims). As a result, the administration is doing nothing to facilitate the work of Daniel Fried, the senior diplomat employed in March 2009 as the Special Envoy to Guantánamo, whose unenviable task it is to persuade other countries to accept released prisoners from Guantánamo.

Even putting aside for a moment the difficulties caused by the refusal of the Court of Appeals and Congress to accept cleared prisoners into the United States (which fuels a reluctance to help in European countries, as Fried acknowledged in a recent interview with the BBC), there are disturbing signs that this reticence on the part of the administration to state openly and categorically that colossal mistakes were made by the Bush administration is also undermining the very decisions made by Obama’s own Task Force.

Recently, for example, when Swiss officials visited Guantánamo to investigate the cases of four men cleared for release, in an attempt to work out if they would be prepared to accept any of these men, they returned, not with an honest appraisal, but with weighted conclusions that could only have been presented to them by the US military, who had, in effect, opened up their files and shown them material which purported to be evidence, but which, in other prisoners’ habeas petitions, has been demonstrated, time and again, to be nothing more than false allegations made by other prisoners (under duress or as a result of bribery) or by the prisoners themselves, multiple levels of unacceptable hearsay, and “mosaics” of intelligence that do not stand up to independent scrutiny.

According to reports in the Swiss media, the government representatives concluded that, of the four men they investigated, two Uighurs were “low-risk,” even though they are no risk at all, having persuaded the Bush administration to drop its claims that they were “enemy combatants,” and having been cleared by military review boards under the Bush administration, by a US District Court, and by the Obama administration’s Task Force, and two other men, an Uzbek and a Palestinian — also cleared by Bush-era military review boards and by Obama’s Task Force — were considered “medium-risk” and “high-risk.”

What has the Task Force been doing for eight months?

Beyond these absurd discrepancies, which do nothing to help Obama’s cause, the other conclusion I draw from an analysis of the Task Force’s figures is that, after eight months of reviewing the prisoners’ cases, it has made very little progress, despite detailed consultations with lawyers and other experts, despite detailed searches for information relating to the men, which was scattered throughout numerous departments and agencies in a disturbingly incoherent manner, and despite the establishment of a database bringing all the available information together in one place.

Although exact numbers are impossible to work out, it is clear that, of the 29 men cleared by the Task Force, all but nine (at most) were actually approved for transfer, between 2006 and 2008, by Administrative Review Boards at Guantánamo. When Obama came to power, eight Tunisians, five Algerians, four Uzbeks, three Palestinians, an Egyptian, a Libyan, and Umar Abdulayev, the Tajik, had all been approved for transfer. Some tweaking has taken place — a Palestinian has been removed from the list, and the Azerbaijani, Poolad Tsiradzho, has been added, plus an Algerian, an Egyptian, two Libyans and three Syrians — and, in addition, it is possible that the Task Force has shifted position on a few of those approved for transfer under Bush.

However, when added to the 14 or so Yemenis discussed in the last article, this figure of 25 or so prisoners is hardly a triumph for the Task Force, and indicates, yet again, that when it comes to Guantánamo, the President’s bold start in January, when he issued his executive order regarding the closure of the prison, has been steadily eroded by confusion, extreme caution and indecision.

If this damned icon of the dark years of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their close advisors is ever to close, it is time for Barack Obama, Eric Holder and Robert Gates to regroup and to accept that confusion plays only into the hands of those haunted by the ghost of Dick Cheney, and that clarity is required. Moreover, despite lawyers’ fears of new waves of litigation, this clarity has to involve the nation’s leaders acknowledging why the District Courts have ruled, in 79 percent of the habeas petitions before them, that the men in question are neither terrorists nor soldiers and should be released.

The truth is out there — and I am only one of many writers who have been explaining it for the last four years — but I will spell it out again: the majority of the prisoners were seized for bounty payments by US allies, were never screened according to the Geneva Conventions to determine whether or not they were combatants of any kind, and are held not because of anything resembling evidence, but through a shamefully poor attempt to build up a case against them in the isolation of Guantánamo, through a combination of torture, coercion and bribery, and the use of raw intelligence masquerading as facts.

Everyone in Guantánamo deserves better than this: both the few dozen men who are genuinely accused of involvement with al-Qaeda, the 9/11 attacks and other acts of international terrorism, who should face trials for their alleged crimes, and the majority of the prison’s population, whose release is still being prevented, or made horrendously complicated, by both the Executive and the lawmakers in Congress — some innocent men, and others who were soldiers in a now almost forgotten civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, whose ongoing detention is based not on any notions of justice, but on the lingering legacy of the Bush administration’s mistaken decision to equate al-Qaeda with the Taliban.

Note: For more information on the prisoners cleared for release, see my article, “Guantánamo’s refugees,” and also see the following profiles on the Reprieve website: Ahmed Belbacha (Algeria), Nabil Hadjarab (Algeria), Said Farhi (Algeria), Adel Fattough Ali El-Gazzar (Egypt), Sherif El-Mashad (Egypt), Ayman al-Shurafa (Palestine), Adel Hakeemy (Tunisia), Hedi Hammamy (Tunisia) and Saleh Sassi (Tunisia).

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 my film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash, and launched in October 2009), 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 The Public Record.

Yesterday, the Irish Times revealed the identity of the second man, and although I respect his desire for privacy, and the chance to begin rebuilding his life after his long ordeal, as much as I recognize Oybek Jabbarov’s right to the same courtesies, I believe that, as with his countryman, it is useful to point out what is known of his story, as it is yet another example of an innocent man losing nearly eight years of his life in a cruel and experimental prison designed to hold human beings without any rights whatsoever.

As I explained in my article on Oybek Jabbarov, men like these two Uzbeks, just two of the many hundreds of innocent men who have been held in Guantánamo over the last seven years and nine months, were “mostly seized by the Americans’ opportunistic allies at a time when bounty payments for ‘al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects’ were widespread, and were then presumed guilty without any screening process by an administration drunk on its own exercise of unfettered executive power.”

The story of Shakhrukh Hamiduva

Unlike Oybek Jabbarov, whose lawyer fought tenaciously to establish his client’s innocence, and actively courted the media, Shakhrukh Hamiduva, the other man freed in Ireland, did not register on the media’s radar during his detention, although I mentioned him in my book The Guantánamo Files. Nevertheless, his story — as accepted by a military review board that cleared him for release from Guantánamo in 2006 — bears striking similarities to that of his fellow countryman: a vulnerable refugee, preyed upon by unscrupulous Afghans following the US-led invasion, when substantial bounty payments were on offer for foreigners who could be presented to gullible US forces as “al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects.”

All that is known publicly of Shakhrukh Hamiduva is that he was born in Kokand, Uzbekistan in December 1983 (and that he was, therefore, probably under 18 years of age at the time of his capture), that he was one of the first prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo in January 2002, and that he gave the following account in December 2004 to his Combatant Status Review Tribunal (the one-sided military boards established to review — and largely endorse — the administration’s contention that everyone who had ended up in US custody was an “enemy combatant” who could be held without rights).

In his tribunal, Hamiduva explained that he left Uzbekistan because of religious persecution, and added that his father and five uncles had been jailed, and that another uncle had been killed. Nevertheless, he had to contend with a number of allegations whose provenance was not disclosed, but which were almost certainly produced as a result of the interrogations of other prisoners (or of Hamiduva himself), in circumstances that may well have involved coercion or bribery. One allegation was that he had spent a year and a half in a training camp run by the Islamic Movement of Tajikistan, but he explained that he had spent that time at a refugee camp, which contained around 300 refugees. He also denied an allegation that he “willingly became a soldier in the Mujahideen Army,” and that he traveled to Afghanistan to “participate in jihad against the Russians and the Northern Alliance.”

In a statement provided to his Personal Representative (a military officer assigned to the prisoners for the tribunals instead of a lawyer), he explained that he had initially wanted to go to Turkey, but that he couldn’t get a passport because he was too young, so he decided to work with the Tajik authorities at the refugee camp instead. This, he said, involved helping the refugees, and he added that the Tajik government then provided transportation to take him and other refugees to Afghanistan (actually deporting them, as they did with hundreds of Uzbek refugees in 1999, including Oybek Jabbarov and his family), where he helped some of them “to fix up things like cars or roofs” at a place in Kabul. He also explained that, after five or six months, he hooked up with an Afghan “mentor,” who owned a garage and taught him to drive, and added that, after working for him for a while, he bought a car and started to work as a taxi driver, which was his occupation when he was captured.

Speaking of his capture, he said that he went to the United Nations in Pakistan (as there was no office in Afghanistan) to get help in returning to Uzbekistan. “They promised me they would be able to help me and send me back to my homeland, but nothing would happen to me and that I would be protected,” he said. “He [a UN official, presumably] gave me a piece of paper. I guess it was some kind of travel document so I would be able to travel along with.”

He explained that, after this visit, he returned to Afghanistan in his car with five or six Afghans from Mazar-e-Sharif, and added that he didn’t want any money from them; he just wanted them to give him directions. However, in the mountains he was stopped by armed Afghans who let his passengers go, but who took his car and handed him over to “the American general” — probably General Rashid Dostum, the Afghan Uzbek warlord who was working with US forces — at Mazar-e-Sharif.

He also explained to the tribunal that he told the Americans his story, and added that they saw his travel document and promised him that they would help him get home, but, after keeping him imprisoned for a month “in some kind of house” with about 15 Pakistanis, they were all transferred to the US prison in Kandahar, and after about a month and a half he was sent to Guantánamo.

Speaking of the nearly three years he had spent in the prison by the time of his CSRT, he told his tribunal, “They said that they were through with me and promise[d] to send me back to my homeland, that’s why I’m confused. When they brought me here for interrogation, I didn’t want to talk a lot to them … They didn’t treat me well here, that is why I didn’t tell them anything.” He added, “I just want to let you know that they torture me a lot here at the camp. They would not let me sleep through the night; they were tak[ing] me to interrogations. I saw them beating other detainees, breaking their arms and legs.”

When the tribunal asked why he was wearing orange (which meant he was uncooperative, as, by 2004, white uniforms had been introduced for “cooperative” prisoners, and tan for those who were somewhere in between), he explained, “I know that there are four levels of discipline. Every time I try to go one level up, they will do something to keep you in the level. I know that there are a lot of detainees who don’t want to talk to the interrogators and no matter what you tell them they are not going to change your level or change your clothes for that matter. I know that a lot of people have been tortured here at the camp … When I don’t exercise I feel very weak, that [is] why I try to exercise inside my cell but MPs don’t like it. That is the only [way] I can keep myself healthy here is by doing some exercise because when you get sick you don’t get any appointments here so what should I do? Every prison detainee should be allowed to exercise; I don’t understand why they don’t allow us.”

As with the story of Oybek Jabbarov, this is a disturbing account on a number of levels. With such limited information available, I have no idea if Shakhrukh Hamiduva, like Jabbarov, was threatened by Uzbek intelligence agents who were allowed to visit Guantánamo (although it seems likely), but enough information is readily available to demonstrate, yet again, that the phrase “the worst of the worst,” as used by senior Bush administration officials to refer to the supposed terrorists in Guantánamo, is more accurately applied to the kind of mistakes made by the administration, which in its myopic arrogance, was more than happy to detain randomly seized foreigners in Afghanistan, and to deprive them of any rights, even if they were under 18 years old, and should, as juveniles, have been rehabilitated rather than being subjected to sleep deprivation, punished for trying to exercise in their cells, and forced to watch as other prisoners were beaten until they were hospitalized.

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, and if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Cross-posted on Common Dreams and The Public Record.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 14 prisoners released from February to August 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, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here), August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal.

It has now been confirmed that one of the Uzbeks freed in Ireland is indeed Oybek Jabbarov, and, while I wish him and his unidentified countryman every opportunity to settle into their new home in peace, I want to take this opportunity to reproduce a letter by Jabbarov, sent from Guantánamo last October (PDF), and a statement by his lawyer, delivered to a House Committee last May, to demonstrate how, in contrast to the hyperbolic claims made by Bush administration officials and their supporters, it was disturbingly easy for innocent men like Oybek Jabbarov to end up in Guantánamo.

These men — and there were many hundreds of innocent men in Guantánamo, and many who are still held — were mostly seized by the Americans’ opportunistic allies at a time when bounty payments for “al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects” were widespread, and were then presumed guilty without any screening process by an administration drunk on its own exercise of unfettered executive power, in which everyone who ended up in US custody was an “unlawful enemy combatant” without rights, regardless of whether, like Oybek Jabbarov, they have lost nearly eight years of their lives for nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Oybek Jabbarov’s letter from Guantánamo, October 8, 2008

Greetings. I am a citizen of Uzbekistan. I want to send you this letter to tell you about myself. I am in prison in Guantánamo since June 2002, but I am innocent and I am approved to leave Guantánamo but where can I go? I cannot go back to my native home, Uzbekistan, because it is not safe for me, my wife, and my two sons. I want to go to a free, safe and democratic country and live the rest of my life in peace with my family.

When I get my freedom, I want to work so I can support myself and my family. I am 30 years old. Ever since I was young, I have worked on farms, growing fruits, vegetables, and also raising livestock. It is very hard work, but I enjoy it very much. My hope is to one day study agriculture and to start my own agri-business. But I am accustomed to hard work and I will work at any job to support myself and my family.

Today I am meeting with my lawyer, Mr. Michael Mone, and I am speaking with him in English with no interpreter. Since I have been here in prison for more than six years, I have learned to speak English. When I get out I also want to take a ESL class to improve my English, although my lawyer tells me that I do not need it.

My time here in Guantánamo has been very hard on me and my family. My two sons are growing up without their father. I miss them very much.

It is a big mistake that I am here. I did nothing wrong and I am innocent. But I do not blame the American people for their government’s mistake. Even though I am still here in this prison I have no hate in my heart. My only wish is to get out of here and to be with my family — to see my two sons, and to find a peaceful life.

Thank [you for] your attention to my letter.

Sincerely,

Oybek Jabbarov

Statement by Michael E. Mone, Jr., delivered to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs’ Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight, May 6, 2008

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for inviting me to speak to the Subcommittee today about my client, Oybek Jamoldinivich Jabbarov, an Uzbek national who is being unlawfully detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

My client is one of approximately 30 detainees who represent “Guantánamo’s refugees.” These are detainees who have been cleared for release by the US government — for some, years ago, yet they remain imprisoned at Guantánamo because they come from “high-risk” countries where there is a potential danger of persecution or torture should they be forcibly returned, and no country, other than Albania, has been willing to accept these refugees from Guantánamo for resettlement.  Indeed, the United States has already transferred detainees from Guantánamo to high-risk countries despite credible individualized fears of persecution or torture upon their repatriation.  My client is one of these refugees, who fears repatriation to his native Uzbekistan.

Oybek’s six-year long imprisonment at the hands of the US government is a tragic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now 30 years old, Oybek and his pregnant wife, infant son, and elderly mother were living with other Uzbek refugees in northern Afghanistan in 2001 when fighting broke out between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance.

Oybek was not captured on the battlefield, nor was he armed. Instead, he accepted a ride from a group of Northern Alliance soldiers he met at a roadside teahouse who said they would give him a ride to Mazar-e-Sharif. Unfortunately, instead of driving him to Mazar-e-Sharif, the soldiers took Oybek to Bagram Air Base where they handed him over to US forces, undoubtedly in exchange for a sizeable bounty. In a desperately poor, war-torn country, Oybek was an easy mark for soldiers responding to leaflets dropped throughout Afghanistan by the US military offering thousands of dollars in cash rewards to anyone who turned over a Taliban or foreign fighter.

After Bagram, Oybek was taken to a prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and then transferred to Guantánamo Bay in June 2002.  During his first few months at Guantánamo, an FBI agent told Oybek, “You’re a free man, you’re not a problem,” and to be patient while diplomatic arrangements were made for his release. But months turned into years and still nothing happened.

Finally, in February 2007, Oybek received approval from the US government to leave Guantánamo. This news brought little comfort, however, because Oybek fears for his life if he is returned to his native Uzbekistan, a county with a long and well-documented history of human rights abuses, including the widespread use of torture.

Indeed, Oybek had a chilling encounter with Uzbek officials who came to Guantánamo in September 2002 to interrogate him. The Uzbek interrogators told Oybek he would be sent to prison upon his return to Uzbekistan and implied he might face torture to force him to confess to things he did not know.

They asked him questions about the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), an outlawed militant group in Central Asia despised by the Uzbek government.  They called Oybek a “Wahhabi” — a pejorative term broadly used by Uzbek authorities to describe individuals they view as radical Islamic extremists. The Uzbek interrogators also told Oybek he would be sent to prison upon his return to Uzbekistan for the alleged crime of “illegally” crossing the border into Tajikistan without a visa — even though no such visa was required at the time. They showed him a photo array and asked if he could identify any of the individuals pictured. When he did not recognize any of the faces, one Uzbek interrogator banged his fist on the table and told him menacingly, “When you go back to Uzbekistan, you will know these things.” Oybek understood the security officer to mean that they would torture him until he told them what they wanted to hear.

My client is more Borat than he is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Unfortunately, Oybek fits the very profile of someone who will face persecution, arrest, imprisonment, and torture at the hands of Uzbek authorities. While Oybek would like to practice Islam freely, even the most basic acts of wearing a prayer cap, keeping a beard, and going to mosque in the Ferghana valley, where he is from, are viewed with grave suspicion by the Uzbek security services.

Even worse, the stigma attached to his prolonged detention in Guantánamo will follow him home with dire consequences. The US government has accused Oybek of being a member of the IMU, as well as supporting al-Qaeda and fighting for the Taliban — all of which Oybek denies and for which no credible evidence has ever been proffered. But these accusations are tantamount to a death sentence if Oybek should ever fall into the hands of the Uzbek authorities.  Having been branded by the United States as an alleged member of an outlawed extremist group that is especially loathed by the Uzbek government, Oybek should expect to face the harshest legal, even extra-judicial treatment if returned to his country. Yet, despite the grave and obvious danger facing him, the US government refuses to rule out repatriating Oybek to his native Uzbekistan.

Oybek yearns to be reunited with his family — to finally meet his youngest son who was born just after his arrest, but he is afraid he will never see his family again if he is returned to Uzbekistan. He is afraid that if he is returned to Uzbekistan he will be killed.

My client continues to languish behind the thick concrete walls and barbed wire of Camp 5 in Guantánamo [a maximum-security block], the result of a grave mistake, not of his own making.  It is our mistake that he sits there and we as a nation need to recognize that Guantánamo does not contain just “the worst of the worst.” It also contains far too many mistakes like my client, a poor soul who was not captured on the battlefield as an armed enemy combatant, but was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We are a great nation, but we are, as our founding fathers envisioned, a perpetual work in progress. Sometimes, our nation has made mistakes — slavery, our treatment of Native Americans, the internment of Japanese Americans, and Jim Crow, to name a few. But part of our greatness lies in our capacity to recognize when we have made a mistake, and to make it right.

Therefore, I think it is fair that we as a nation ask ourselves: How many more days must Oybek remain in Guantánamo for our mistake? How many more days must he sit in his 8×12 cell, before we make it right?

*****

Announcing the arrival of Jabbarov and his unidentified countryman in their new home, the Irish Justice Minister Dermot Ahern explained to reporters, “The resettlement of the two individuals is a humanitarian gesture. They should be allowed time and space to rebuild their lives.” He added, “Ireland is a welcoming country and we are pleased to play our part with President Obama in assisting in the closing of this center [Guantánamo].”

According to the Associated Press, Irish government representatives said that the two Uzbeks “would be housed in state-provided housing at undisclosed locations, and would receive permanent residency rights rather than be treated as refugees,” which would “allow them to work in Ireland and travel within the 27-nation EU.”

The AP also explained that Jabbarov had been “the focus of concerted campaigning by Irish human rights groups that identified his case as a clear-cut miscarriage of justice.” His lawyer, Michael J. Mone Jr., has stated that his client “liked the idea of living in Ireland, in part because it is a land with many sheep. He was a shepherd in Uzbekistan.” The only cloud hovering over his resettlement is the fate of his wife and two young children. As Radio Free Europe reported in January, “His family’s whereabouts are unclear. They were living at a UN refugee camp in Mashhad in Iran, but reportedly are no longer there.”

My hope for Oybek Jabbarov, after his long, cruel and unjust ordeal, is not only that he will be left in peace to resume his life, but also that he will soon be reunited with his family.

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. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009, and if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 14 prisoners released from February to August 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, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here), August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal.

The third man, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, is a Yemeni, whose habeas corpus petition was granted by Judge Gladys Kessler in May this year. In her ruling, which I described at length in two articles at the time, “Judge Condemns ‘Mosaic’ Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses,” and “Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies,” Judge Kessler “demolished the government’s case against him, painting a disturbing picture of unreliable allegations made by other prisoners who were tortured, coerced, bribed or suffering from mental health issues, and a ‘mosaic’ of intelligence, purporting to rise to the level of evidence, which actually relied, to an intolerable degree, on second- or third-hand hearsay, guilt by association and unsupportable suppositions.” The case was one of the highlights of the prisoners’ successes in the courts, which, to date, have resulted in 30 victories out of 38 hearings, as I reported here, here and here, with updates here and here.

Although it is reassuring that Ali Ahmed has finally been released to Yemen, it remains sadly apparent that only 14 Yemenis have been repatriated since the prison opened, and that nearly a hundred Yemenis remain in Guantánamo, stuck, for the most part, because the US and Yemeni governments cannot reach a mutually satisfactory agreement regarding their return. Although exact figures are unknown, it has long been apparent that 12 of the Yemenis still held were approved for transfer by military review boards (some as long ago as 2006), and my research indicates that the US government has no intention of charging, or continuing to hold between half and two-thirds of the remaining Yemenis, if some sort of agreement can be reached.

With these releases, 223 men remain in Guantánamo (and another, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, is in prison in New York awaiting a federal court trial that is scheduled to begin in September 2010). 549 prisoners have now been released from Guantánamo (17 since Barack Obama took office), and six have died in the prison.

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. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009, and if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 14 prisoners released from February to August 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, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here), August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal.

The trigger for this sudden shifting of legal protections for some of the most vulnerable prisoners in Guantánamo (from countries with notoriously poor human rights records, including Algeria, Libya, Tunisia and Uzbekistan) was the response to a ruling last October, by District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina, after the government (reeling from a shocking court defeat in June) conceded that it could no longer claim that the Uighurs were “enemy combatants.” Judge Urbina ruled that they should be relocated to the US mainland, because the government conceded that it was unsafe to return them to China, because no other country had been found that would accept them, and because continuing to hold them in Guantánamo was unconstitutional.

The government disagreed, and appealed Judge Urbina’s ruling, and when the Court of Appeals came to review the case, a panel of three judges — including Judge A. Raymond Randolph, a man noted for endorsing every Bush administration policy regarding the “War on Terror” that was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court — reversed Judge Urbina’s ruling, deciding that the courts had no business interfering in immigration policies that were the preserve of the Executive.

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.”

In response to the ruling, the Uighurs’ lawyers filed a petition with the Supreme Court (a writ of certiorari, essentially a petition asking for a judicial review). A date in June was set for a hearing, amid fears from the lawyers that the government would find other countries to take the Uighurs before that date, so that the Supreme Court could be persuaded not to review the Circuit Court’s ruling, and to rule on whether it was indeed acceptable that the Executive should be able to gut the lower courts’ habeas rulings of all meaning by refusing to allow judges to order the prisoners’ release.

In the end, the government managed only to dispose of four of the Uighurs before the deadline (sending them to Bermuda), but the Supreme Court then decided to refrain from hearing the case until October, perhaps to give the government time to resolve the issue itself.

This case, Kiyemba v. Bush (which became Kiyemba v. Obama) is now known as “Kiyemba I,” because, in response to the ruling by the Court of Appeals, the Uighurs’ lawyers submitted an appeal on their clients’ behalf, also filed as Kiyemba v. Obama, and now known as “Kiyemba II.” In the brief, they 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, not 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” (PDF), 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.”

The court added that strenuous efforts had been made by the US government not to transfer prisoners to countries where they might face torture, and “The upshot is that the detainees are not liable to be cast around willy-nilly without regard to their likely treatment in any country that will take them,” but in any case, as the judges also explained, “the district court may not question the Government’s determination that a potential recipient country is not likely to torture a detainee,” because “The judiciary is not suited to second-guess such determinations.”

With that decision, effectively, the case was lost. The Uighurs’ lawyers announced their intention to appeal this second ruling to the Supreme Court, and it is currently anticipated that the Supreme Court will address both “Kiyemba I” and “Kiyemba II” sometime next month.

However, the fallout from the Court of Appeals’ insistence that no court is empowered to prevent the government from sending prisoners wherever it wishes has had a disturbing knock-on effect on other cases (as many as 150 of the remaining 225 prisoners, according to SCOTUSblog), in which lawyers have, since 2005, persuaded the courts to order the government to provide 30 days’ notice in advance of any proposed transfer, and, in some cases, including that of Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian who had lived in the UK, have secured injunctions preventing any attempt to repatriate their clients.

Belbacha’s case is, in many ways, emblematic of the issues at stake. Although he was cleared for release from Guantánamo by a military review board in February 2007, he is terrified of returning to Algeria, where he fears persecution both by the government and by the Islamists whose threats forced him to flee his homeland in the first place. His case has attracted widespread support from human rights organizations, and has also received international media coverage.

Since the Court of Appeals made its ruling in “Kiyemba II,” lawyers have been aware that the 30-day notices and injunctions were under threat, but it was not until September 8, when the court issued its mandate regarding “Kiyemba II”, which formally implements its ruling, that the way was paved for the government, if it wishes, to lawfully repatriate prisoners who, like Belbacha, would rather remain in Guantánamo than return home.

As a result, Belbacha’s lawyers have filed a motion with the Court of Appeals asking the judges “to hold this case in abeyance pending the Supreme Court’s disposition of a petition for certiorari that the petitioners in Kiyemba intend to file.” The judges may well respond by reiterating that they are secure in assurances from the government that “the detainees are not liable to be cast around willy-nilly without regard to their likely treatment in any country that will take them,” but with just four months to go until the deadline is reached for Obama’s promised closure of Guantánamo, it is, I believe, legitimate to entertain fears that the administration may wish to repatriate cleared prisoners to countries it regards as safe (following “intense diplomatic negotiations,” or some such explanation), but which the prisoners and their lawyers still regard as a profound threat.

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. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009, 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 The Public Record.

Many of these prisoners have been cleared since 2006, and yet the majority of them are still held in conditions of profound isolation. At the very least, President Obama should be ensuring that all the prisoners are held in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, as he promised in a Presidential order on his second day in office, and that the cleared prisoners are held in Camp 4, away from the isolation blocks, where the fortunate few are allowed to live communally.

However, as I reported yesterday, with a mass hunger strike currently raging at the prison, and at least 42 of the remaining 242 prisoners being force-fed, severe doubts remain about the ability of defense secretary Robert Gates to ensure that Guantánamo conforms to the requirements of the Geneva Conventions within the deadline of a month that was established by the President.

European support for accepting Guantánamo prisoners

For the prisoners who have been cleared for release, there was, however, some good news last week, when, by an overwhelming majority of 542 votes to 55 (with 51 abstentions), the European Parliament passed a resolution on Guantánamo, which, as the BBC reported, “called for EU states to accept low-risk prisoners who cannot be sent home for fear they might be mistreated.”

Although there were dissenters — the right-wing German politician Harthmuth Nassauer, for example, claimed that many of the men “remain potential terrorists” — British MEP Graham Watson caught the general tone of the decision when he said, “Europe cannot stand back and shrug its shoulders and say these things are for America alone to sort out.” He stated that a crucial lesson to be learned from the Bush administration was that, “in the administration of international justice, the go-it-alone mentality ends in a cul-de-sac of failure,” and urged member states to recall that, although the Bush administration had led the way in the “War on Terror,” European countries also bore their share of the blame. “Too often member states from our union were complicit in what the Bush administration did,” he said.

Since Barack Obama was elected in November, the countries of Europe have struggled to present a coherent view on Guantánamo. In December — on the 60th anniversary of the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — Portugal was the first country to state openly that it would accept some of the cleared prisoners, but other countries were slow to follow the Portuguese example.

However, with Barack Obama now installed in the White House, the European Parliament’s enthusiastic support for resettling Guantánamo prisoners may now yield some tangible results. On Saturday, in his first visit to Europe, Vice President Joe Biden said that it was “time to press the reset button and revisit the many areas where we can and should work together.” Using Guantánamo as an example, he stated, “As we seek a lasting framework for our common struggle against extremism, we will have to work cooperatively with other nations around the world — and we will need your help.”

In the last few days, media outlets throughout Europe and beyond have been buzzing with claims that European countries are now prepared to help out. On Friday, it was reported that the Spanish government had “expressed its willingness” to consider accepting prisoners “on a case-by-case basis within the context of a European Union consensus on the issue,” and that the Czech foreign minister had said that, “if the United States asked the EU to accept some Guantánamo prisoners, the Czech Republic would consider the request.”

Courting the Uighurs

Even more significantly, the municipal council of Munich indicated that it was backing a motion submitted by the Green Party to accept Guantánamo’s most famous cleared prisoners, 17 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province), who had fled to Afghanistan to escape persecution by the Chinese government. The Uighurs are unique in that they are the only prisoners who, through a resounding court victory last June, managed to persuade the Bush administration to drop its claim that they were “enemy combatants,” and their settlement in Munich would make sense, as the Bavarian city is home to the largest Uighur community outside of China.

Munich’s municipal council is acting unilaterally (with no guarantee that the German Chancellor will back the motion), but is not the only party interested in accepting the Uighurs. Last week the Associated Press reported that three of the Uighurs had applied for settlement in Canada, although the reporters also pointed out that previous attempts by the US to re-house the Uighurs in Canada had been unsuccessful. In February 2007, notes prepared for Peter MacKay, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, indicated that it was probable that they would be “inadmissible under Canadian immigration law.”

When the news about the Uighurs’ claim was announced last Tuesday, Liberal Senator Colin Kenny, the former chairman of the Canadian Senate’s national security and defense committee, stated that he supported the return to Canada of its only citizen in Guantánamo, Omar Khadr, a teenager at the time of his capture who has been repeatedly ignored by successive Canadian governments, but added that he had no interest in accepting any other prisoners. “Why should people clean up their dirty business?” Kenny asked, adding, “I don’t have much sympathy with the Americans for creating that prison.”

On Wednesday, however, it was revealed that Immigration Minister Jason Kenney (no relation) was contemplating whether to accept the Uighurs’ request, and was looking at the viability of issuing “temporary residence permits,” valid for up to three years, which would “allow the detainees to bypass the backlogged refugee process.”

These developments are a positive step for the Uighurs, of course, especially as countries willing to take the Uighurs risk a diplomatic rift with China by doing so. As the Canadian story surfaced last week, the Chinese foreign ministry made a point of issuing a statement about the Uighurs. Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Fu said, “As for those Chinese terror suspects that are kept in Guantánamo, as we have stated before, we strongly oppose any country accepting these people.”

Why the Uighurs are an American problem

Nevertheless, there are two problems with this focus on the Uighurs. Firstly, as I have made clear in previous articles, when Judge Ricardo Urbina reviewed their case in October (almost exactly four months ago), he ruled that their continued detention in Guantánamo was unconstitutional, and, because no other country had been found that was prepared to accept them, ordered them to be delivered to his courtroom so that he could make arrangements for them to be resettled in the United States, in the care of communities in Washington D.C. and Tallahassee, Florida, who had prepared detailed plans for their welfare and support.

The Bush administration shamelessly appealed, protesting that the men still posed a threat — even though it had conceded that they did not — and insisting that a District Court judge did not have the right to order their release into the United States. This too was also a false assertion, as Judge Judith W. Rogers, one of the appeal court judges explained in a dissenting opinion, when her colleagues approved the stay on Judge Urbina’s ruling that had been requested by the government. As a result, I believe that the obligation to re-house the Uighurs still rests with the US government, and I join with Sabin Willett, a lawyer for the Uighurs, who has spent long years publicizing their plight, in asking Robert Gates and Attorney General Eric Holder to release them into the United States.

As Willett stated in a letter on January 23:

We urge the government to release the Uighurs immediately in the only place they can be released — the United States. Not only would this be just, but it is in our national interest. By accepting the Uighurs, we would encourage other countries to accept the significant number of Guantánamo detainees who are cleared for release but who cannot be repatriated. Bringing the Uighurs here is thus an important early step toward carrying out President Obama’s Executive Order and removing a stain on our National character.

The second problem with the widespread focus on the Uighurs is that it detracts from the cases of the other men held at Guantánamo who desperately need third countries to re-house them. Of the 44 cleared prisoners who are not Uighurs, 23 more men are currently seeking new homes. Three — of Palestinian origin — are essentially stateless, as it has proven impossible to negotiate their return with the Israeli authorities, and the other 20 — five Algerians, an Egyptian, a Libyan, a Tajik, eight Tunisians and four Uzbeks — cannot be repatriated because their safety cannot be guaranteed in their home countries. Last year, when two Tunisians were repatriated, these dangers were demonstrated with an alarming clarity. On their return, despite an agreement with the US government that they would be treated fairly, the two men were subjected to show trials based on evidence extracted through the torture of another prisoner, and given jail sentences of three and seven years.

It is clear that none of the cleared prisoners poses a threat to anyone, for the simple reason that, in a prison based on the presumption of guilt — in which everyone has been held as an “enemy combatant” without rights, solely because the President said they were — those who have been approved for release, after multiple military reviews, have only succeeded in doing so because the authorities have concluded that they do not pose any danger to the United States or its allies.

So who are these other men?

There is not the space here to discuss all their stories, but they include Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian who fled persecution by Islamists and came to the UK, where he settled in the seaside town of Bournemouth, and received a tip and a thank-you note from Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister, after cleaning his room during a political conference. Ahmed’s only mistakes were to take a holiday in Pakistan in the fall of 2001, and to do so before his asylum application was complete.

Another is Nabil Hadjarab, a young Algerian from a broken home, with relatives in Lyon, who was only persuaded to travel to Afghanistan because he was caught in limbo between Algeria and France as his family disintegrated around him, and another is Rafiq al-Hami, a 39-year old Tunisian who had lived in Germany, where he had worked in restaurants and for a Turkish cleaning company. Seized randomly in Pakistan, far from the battlefields of Afghanistan, al-Rami was nevertheless sent to the CIA’s notorious “Dark Prison” near Kabul, which resembled a medieval torture dungeon, but with the addition of painfully loud music, blasted into the cells 24 hours a day.

Then there are seven Tunisians, who were all Italian residents. I covered the stories of five of these men last year, and one of them, to give just one example, is Adel al-Hakeemy, who had lived in Italy for eight years, working as a chef’s assistant in several hotels in Bologna, before traveling to Pakistan to get married. “I lived with Italians in their homes,” he explained to his lawyers. “I am used to their culture. The Italians worked alongside me, they respected me, they treated me as their brother.”

While these prisoners already have connections with specific European countries, others, like the Libyan Abdul Rauf al-Qassim, do not. Cleared since 2006, al-Qassim — essentially a refugee from Libya who married an Afghan woman and had a daughter he has not seen since she was a baby — was also seized in Pakistan at a time when bounty payments for “terror suspects” were widespread, and foreign Arabs were easy prey, and he has been fighting in the US courts to prevent his repatriation for nearly two years.

Another is Adel Fattough Ali El-Gazzar, an accountant and a former officer in the Egyptian army, who had traveled to the Pakistani border to provide humanitarian aid to Afghan refugees, but was caught in a US bombing raid. “I saw a light and heard a voice and then I lost consciousness,” he explained in Guantánamo.  “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 there are the Palestinians: Ayman al-Shurafa, a student whose education in Gaza was disrupted by the Intifada, who was persuaded to travel to Afghanistan for jihad, but who regretted his decision and never raised arms against anybody; Assem Matruq al-Aasmi, another duped young recruit, who was wounded by a grenade; and Mahar al-Quwari, an older man, with a wife and children, who had drifted to Afghanistan in search of work after a fruitless trip to visit the UN in Pakistan, to sort out papers for his family, but who ended up being sold by Afghan villagers to the Northern Alliance, who in turn sold him to the Americans.

Completing this brief guide to the cleared prisoners are the Uzbeks, whose government’s human rights abuses are notorious: Shakrukh Hamiduva, just 18 years old at the time of his capture, who was working as a taxi driver in Afghanistan when he was seized by Afghan bounty hunters; Ali Sher Hamidullah, a drifter who explained in Guantánamo that the Uzbek intelligence agents who visited him told him that “the only thing that waits for me in Uzbekistan is a bullet in my head”; Kamalludin Kasimbekov, who had been forcibly recruited to join the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, allies of the Taliban; and Oybek Jabbarov, a 30-year old father of two, who suffers from health problems related to a botched surgical procedure on a ruptured disk in his back in 2007.

Unwillingly transplanted to Afghanistan along with fighters from the IMU, Jabbarov explained in Guantánamo that he made a living “buying and selling sheep, chicken and goats,” and was told in December 2001 that the government was giving out ID cards to immigrants at Bagram airbase. “There, I saw American soldiers,” he said. “They just took me inside, they questioned me, and they kept me for a few days. I’ve been detained ever since.”

His lawyer, Michael Mone, who recently explained that he had taken on Jabbarov’s case because “I felt I could no longer stand on the sidelines and permit this gross executive power grab, which is how I view [Bush's] actions as they relate to torture, rendition, and the creation of Guantánamo as this [legal] black hole,” stated that his client had also been threatened by Uzbek intelligence agents. “They at one point showed him a photo array and asked him if he could identify any of the individuals,” Mone said in a recent interview. “And when he couldn’t identify any of them, one of the Uzbeks banged his fist on the table and said, ‘When you get back to Uzbekistan, you will know these things.’ And Oybek took that to mean that when he got back to Uzbekistan, they would torture him until he told them what they wanted to hear.”

I leave the final word to Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who has not always been a voice of reason when it comes to assessing the threat posed by terrorism, but who, on this occasion, captured a truth to which governments — including the US government — should pay close attention. As reported in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, Garzon said, “We have to confront the reality that some bad people will end up walking the streets, like the former rapists, robbers and terrorists whom we have walking the streets once they complete their sentence and are released. We have to take the risks that are necessary in a democratic society.”

The alternative, lest we forget, is Guantánamo, as conceived by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, a place where, ideally, everyone is presumed guilty, no one is ever charged or tried, and no one is ever released.

Note: For those who are keeping count, the other 21 cleared prisoners are not apparently in immediate need of the assistance of third countries. Six are Saudis, whose release should be straightforward, as the Saudi government has run a successful rehabilitation program and has processed 109 returned prisoners in the last two years (with a low rate of recidivism, contrary to recent reports), twelve are Yemenis (and there are hopes that the long diplomatic impasse between the US and Yemeni governments will soon be resolved, so that they can be repatriated), and the release of the other three — two Bosnians of Algerian origin, and Mohammed El-Gharani, a resident of Chad — was ordered by District Court Judge Richard Leon, when he recently ruled, in their habeas corpus reviews, that the government had failed to establish a case against them.

Additional note: Oybek Jabbarov is known to the Pentagon as Abu Bakir Jamaludinovich. For the story of the Tajik prisoner, Omar Abdulayev, see The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras 9 – Seized in Pakistan (Part One). In addition, one of the Saudis cleared for release is the British resident Shaker Aamer, profiled here, and one of the other Tunisians is Lotfi bin Ali (known to the Pentagon as Mohammed Abdul Rahman), whose struggle to prevent his forcible return to Tunisia is described here.

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). This article draws on passages from the book. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed.

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

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Uighurs in Guantánamo, see: The Guantánamo whistleblower, a Libyan shopkeeper, some Chinese Muslims and a desperate government (July 2007), Guantánamo’s Uyghurs: Stranded in Albania (October 2007), Former Guantánamo detainee seeks asylum in Sweden (November 2007), A transcript of Sabin Willett’s speech in Stockholm (November 2007), Support for ex-Guantánamo detainee’s Swedish asylum claim (January 2008), A Chinese Muslim’s desperate plea from Guantánamo (March 2008), Former Guantánamo prisoner denied asylum in Sweden (June 2008), Six Years Late, Court Throws Out Guantánamo Case (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (July 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), A Pastor’s Plea for the Guantánamo Uyghurs (October 2008), Guantánamo: Justice Delayed or Justice Denied? (October 2008), Sabin Willett’s letter to the Justice Department (November 2008), Will Europe Take The Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), and the stories in the additional chapters of The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras 1, Website Extras 6 and Website Extras 9.

With just one more online chapter to complete, the mission I set myself three years ago — to record the stories of all the prisoners in Guantánamo — is now close to completion, and will be followed by the first definitive prisoner list, identifying not only those who are still held, and those who have been released (and the dates they were released), but also those who have been cleared for release, whose plight is one of the major stumbling blocks to Barack Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo within a year, as the majority of these prisoners cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will be tortured in their home countries.

Of the 779 prisoners who have been held at Guantánamo, the stories of around 10 percent are unknown, because they were released in 2003 or 2004, and the Pentagon has not been obliged to release and information relating to these prisoners, but the rest will be sourced and referenced in the definitive list. Links will be provided to the stories of half of these prisoners, and references will be provided for the other half, identifying where their stories can be found in The Guantánamo Files. The list will, I hope, be a useful research tool, not just in identifying the stories of those who have been released, but also as an aid to analyzing the stories of those who are still held, to compare the Bush administration’s long-standing assertions that the remaining prisoners are the “hardcore” with a more objective view, which, in the majority of cases, questions the quality of the so-called evidence against them.

This eleventh online chapter features the stories of 17 of the 220 or so Afghan prisoners who have been held at Guantánamo, revealing, as I also discussed at length in The Guantánamo Files, how the majority of the Afghans were seized not because they were a threat to the US or its allies, but largely because they were sold to US forces by their Afghan allies or were seized in raids based on dubious intelligence. Three of those discussed — including Mohamed Jawad, put forward for trial by Military Commission — were juveniles at the time of their capture. The chapter also includes the stories of half-a-dozen stray foreigners. In addition, I look at the stories of six of the 50 or so Guantánamo prisoners who were subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and detention in secret prisons before their transfer to Guantánamo, and cast an objective eye on the supposed evidence used to justify their extraordinarily brutal treatment.

Note: See the column on the left for the first ten online chapters, and the last.

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In a letter to other EU leaders, Luís Amado, Portugal’s Foreign Minister, declared, “The time has come for the European Union to step forward. As a matter of principle and coherence, we should send a clear signal of our willingness to help the US government in that regard, namely through the resettlement of detainees. As far as the Portuguese government is concerned, we will be available to participate.”

The Portuguese offer addresses a problem that has plagued Guantánamo for years, and that is, moreover, one of the major obstacles to Barack Obama’s promise to close the prison: what to do with the prisoners who have been cleared for release from Guantánamo after multiple military reviews, but who cannot be freed because of international treaties preventing the return of foreign nationals to countries where they face the risk of torture?

These men, numbering at least 60 of the remaining 255 prisoners, are from countries including Algeria, China, Libya, Tunisia and Uzbekistan. They are no longer regarded as a threat to the United States or its allies, but they remain in Guantánamo because, until now, only one country has stepped forward to give new homes to cleared prisoners. Albania accepted eight cleared prisoners — five Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province) in May 2006, and three others (an Algerian teacher, an Egyptian cleric and a refugee from the former Soviet Union) in December 2006.

A week after Barack Obama’s election victory, a number of human rights groups — including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — launched a campaign in Berlin aimed at persuading European governments to accept cleared prisoners, but until the Portuguese government spoke out last week, the response had been lukewarm.

On November 13, Amnesty International announced that Switzerland had refused asylum applications by three cleared prisoners from Algeria, China and Libya, and on December 12 the Irish Times confirmed that Justice Minister Dermot Ahern had stated that the Irish government was “not contemplating the resettlement of any Guantánamo inmates,” apparently dashing the hopes of Uzbek refugee Oybek Jamoldinivich Jabbarov, who was sold to US forces in Afghanistan seven years ago, that he might finally be released from Guantánamo.

In addition, the legal action charity Reprieve, whose lawyers represent around 30 Guantánamo prisoners, has so far failed to interest the British government in accepting the return of Algerian national Ahmed Belbacha (photo, left), even though he lived in the UK for two years and only left Algeria because he was threatened by Islamist militants, and has also had no success in persuading the French government to accept Nabil Hadjarab, a former resident with family in France, and in resettling six Tunisians and an Egyptian who had all been residents in Italy. One other country, Sweden, which was widely perceived as sympathetic to refugees, dashed all hopes that it would lead the way in repatriating Guantánamo prisoners in June this year, when it refused asylum to Adel Abdul Hakim, one of the five Uighurs freed in Albania. Hakim had applied for asylum in November 2007, after securing a visa to visit his sister, who is part of a Uighur community in Stockholm.

One of the major obstacles to European support, of course, has been the Bush administration’s unwillingness to accept responsibility for its own mistakes by working to secure the release of cleared prisoners into the United States. For several years, State Department officials have been touring the world, attempting to persuade third countries to accept some of these men, but without success. Their failure is partly because the administration refuses to concede that any prisoners seized in the “War on Terror” are innocent men captured by mistake — choosing instead to refer to them as “No Longer Enemy Combatants” or “enemy combatants” who have been “approved for transfer” — but it is also because the administration has taken a hectoring tone with other countries, chastising them for failing to help, rather than addressing them in a conciliatory manner.

Unfortunately, comments made since the Portuguese announcement by the State Department’s legal adviser, John Bellinger, have done nothing to suggest that the prevailing attitude has changed. Speaking to Reuters, Bellinger called Luis Amado’s letter “extraordinarily significant.” He revealed, “It is the first time that any country except Albania has privately or publicly stated that they are prepared to resettle Guantánamo detainees who are not their own nationals.” This was not strictly accurate, as Germany, Spain and the UK have also accepted the return of legal residents, but what made Bellinger’s comments particularly troubling was when he added, “It really is the first crack in the ice of what has been European opposition to helping with Guantánamo in any way. For five or six years there has been consistent criticism but no constructive offers to help … Europe need to stop simply calling for its closure but to step up and actually help with its closure.”

As a result of these unhelpful comments, it seems probable that the plight of Guantánamo’s refugees in limbo is unlikely to change until Barack Obama takes over from George W. Bush in January, when he will, hopefully, be able to muzzle State Department criticism of US allies, and secure cooperation as part of his honeymoon period. However, good will alone may not be enough to persuade other countries to help the new President to close Guantánamo. Speaking to the Washington Post, Jennifer Daskal, senior counter-terrorism counsel for Human Rights Watch, suggested that the Portuguese announcement might be “the start of a trend,” but added that she believed European cooperation would hinge on a willingness by the United States to take cleared prisoners as well. “The new Obama administration,” she said, “is going to have to jump-start this by accepting some of the detainees.”

In particular, President Obama will need to address the plight of the 17 remaining Uighurs in Guantánamo. With the exception of five Bosnian Algerians, whose release was ordered last month by District Court judge Richard Leon, after he was allowed to review the government’s evidence against the men, and ruled that the administration had failed to establish a case for holding them, the Uighurs are the only prisoners at Guantánamo who have been cleared of being “enemy combatants.”

In June, when an appeals court was finally allowed to review the case against one of the men, Huzaifa Parhat, the judges demolished the government’s allegations, ruling that Parhat’s status as an “enemy combatant” was invalid, and comparing the government’s evidence to a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In the months that followed, the government abandoned trying to prove that any of the Uighurs were “enemy combatants,” and when their case reached the Washington D.C. District Court in October, Judge Ricardo Urbina ruled that their continued detention was unconstitutional, and ordered their release into the United States, as no other country had been found that would accept them.

Unfortunately for the Uighurs, the government, which was still drunk on the dreams of unfettered executive power that had sustained it for over seven years, refused to accept that the Supreme Court’s momentous ruling in June, which granted the Guantánamo prisoners “the privilege of habeas corpus to challenge the legality of their detention,” also held that “a court’s power under the writ must include ‘authority to … issue … an order directing the prisoner’s release.’”

Effectively arguing that the whims of the executive trumped the ruling of a judge, the government also attempted to resuscitate claims that the Uighurs were involved in militancy, even though it had been established without a doubt that they had only one enemy — the Chinese government — and even though the administration itself had abandoned any claims of militancy when it accepted that none of the men were “enemy combatants.”

The appeals court judges have yet to deliver a final ruling on the Uighurs, but in the meantime it became apparent last week, in comments that John Bellinger made to the BBC, that he supports the government’s unprincipled and unjustifiable opinions, when he stated that the Uighurs were “properly detained,” because, although they “wanted to fight the Chinese,” they “were in training camps.”

Bellinger’s words not only suggest, incredibly, that the administration believes it is justified in holding anyone as an “enemy combatant” who has attended any kind of military training camp (even those that have no connection whatsoever with al-Qaeda or the Taliban); they also cut off any hope that another country will be prepared to accept the Uighurs. For Barack Obama to succeed in closing Guantánamo, he will not only need to repudiate opinions like these, but will also need to find the courage to follow Judge Urbina’s ruling that holding the Uighurs is unconstitutional, and to secure their release to the communities in Washington D.C. and Tallahassee, Florida, who have already made detailed plans to welcome them. Anything less, and his mission to close Guantánamo and regain America’s moral standing may well be doomed.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, 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.

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

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Uighurs in Guantánamo, see: The Guantánamo whistleblower, a Libyan shopkeeper, some Chinese Muslims and a desperate government (July 2007), Guantánamo’s Uyghurs: Stranded in Albania (October 2007), Former Guantánamo detainee seeks asylum in Sweden (November 2007), A transcript of Sabin Willett’s speech in Stockholm (November 2007), Support for ex-Guantánamo detainee’s Swedish asylum claim (January 2008), A Chinese Muslim’s desperate plea from Guantánamo (March 2008), Former Guantánamo prisoner denied asylum in Sweden (June 2008), Six Years Late, Court Throws Out Guantánamo Case (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (July 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), A Pastor’s Plea for the Guantánamo Uyghurs (October 2008), Guantánamo: Justice Delayed or Justice Denied? (October 2008), Sabin Willett’s letter to the Justice Department (November 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), Guantanamo’s refugees (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), and the stories in the additional chapters of The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras 1, Website Extras 6 and Website Extras 9.