Archive for September, 2009

For the Guardian’s Comment is free, “Letting go of control orders” is an article I wrote examining whether the government’s much-criticized system of house arrest for terror suspects held without charge or trial on the basis of secret evidence is on the verge of collapse after a judge quashed the control order that had kept a joint British-Libyan national (identified only as AF) tagged, monitored and held on a 14-hour curfew for over three years.

The judge’s decision followed a crucial ruling in June, when the Law Lords demonstrated that they had had enough of the government’s approach to dealing with terror suspects who cannot be deported (in some cases because they are British nationals) and who, ministers maintain, cannot be put forward for a trial, because it would compromise intelligence sources and methods, by ruling that the imposition of control orders breaches Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to a fair trial, because a suspect held under a control order is not given “sufficient information about the allegations against him to enable him to give effective instructions to the special advocate assigned to him.”

With strong hints from the Home Office that the remaining control orders (thought to number around 19) will be allowed to lapse, now is a good time not only for the government to finally accept that it should join the rest of the world in finding a way to use intercept evidence in court (involving a number of perfectly valid techniques to protect its sources and methods — see PDF), but also for campaigners to press the government to drop the cases of a number of other men held on deportation bail, who are also being detained on the basis of secret evidence.

As this latest case concerned a joint British-Libyan national, writing this article also gave me an opportunity to demonstrate how, with regard to the Libyans held as terror suspects in the UK, the British government appears to be less concerned with preventing terrorism, and more concerned with bowing to the wishes of the pariah-turned-ally Colonel Gaddafi, and the lucrative oil contracts that await British companies in the Libyan desert. As I note in the conclusion to my article, “As the control order regime crumbles, it is time that this hypocrisy regarding the Libyans also comes to an end.”

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

For other articles dealing with Belmarsh, control orders, deportation bail, deportations and extraditions, see Deals with dictators undermined by British request for return of five Guantánamo detainees (August 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: the troubling tale of Tunisian Belmarsh detainee Hedi Boudhiba, extradited, cleared and abandoned in Spain (August 2007), Guantánamo as house arrest: Britain’s law lords capitulate on control orders (November 2007), The Guantánamo Britons and Spain’s dubious extradition request (December 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: control orders renewed, as one suspect is freed (February 2008), Spanish drop “inhuman” extradition request for Guantánamo Britons (March 2008), UK government deports 60 Iraqi Kurds; no one notices (March 2008), Repatriation as Russian Roulette: Will the Two Algerians Freed from Guantánamo Be Treated Fairly? (July 2008), Abu Qatada: Law Lords and Government Endorse Torture (February 2009), Ex-Guantánamo prisoner refused entry into UK, held in deportation centre (February 2009), Home Secretary ignores Court decision, kidnaps bailed men and imprisons them in Belmarsh (February 2009), Britain’s insane secret terror evidence (March 2009), Torture taints all our lives (published in the Guardian’s Comment is free), Britain’s Guantánamo: Calling For An End To Secret Evidence, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (1) Detainee Y, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (2) Detainee BB, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (3) Detainee U, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (4) Hussain Al-Samamara, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (5) Detainee Z, Britain’s Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction? and URGENT APPEAL on British terror laws: Get your MP to support Diane Abbott’s Early Day Motion on the use of secret evidence (all April 2009), and Taking liberties with our justice system and Death in Libya, betrayal in the West (both for the Guardian), Law Lords Condemn UK’s Use of Secret Evidence And Control Orders (June 2009), Miliband Shows Leadership, Reveals Nothing About Torture To Parliamentary Committee (June 2009), Britain’s Torture Troubles: What Tony Blair Knew (June 2009), Seven years of madness: the harrowing tale of Mahmoud Abu Rideh and Britain’s anti-terror laws, Would you be able to cope?: Letters by the children of control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh, Control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh to be allowed to leave the UK (all June 2009), Testing control orders and Dismantle the secret state (for the Guardian), UK government issues travel document to control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh after horrific suicide attempt (July 2009), Secret evidence in the case of the North West 10 “terror suspects” (August 2009).

On August 28, in the first indication that European countries are prepared to help the Obama administration fulfill its promise to close Guantánamo by accepting prisoners who have been cleared for release, but who cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will face torture on their return, the Portuguese interior ministry announced that two Syrian prisoners had arrived from Guantánamo and had been released on their arrival in Portugal. Officials added that they are “not subject to any charge, they are free people and are living in homes provided by the state.”

Last December, Portugal took the lead in offering to rehouse cleared prisoners from Guantánamo, when, in a letter to other EU leaders, Luís Amado, the Portuguese 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 deal was apparently sealed in June, when the government announced that it was ready to take “two or three” prisoners from Guantánamo, following a visit by US Special Envoy Daniel Fried. On arrival in Portugal, the men’s identities were not known, but on Monday, court documents released by the Justice Department (PDF) revealed that the two men are 27-year old Mohammed al-Tumani (identified by the Pentagon as Muhammed Khan Tumani), and 37-year old Moammar Badawi Dokhan.

In a press release issued on Friday, the US Justice Department explained the circumstances of the men’s release, stressing that the final say in approving their transfer had been taken by Congress. “As directed by the President’s Jan. 22, 2009 Executive Order, the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force conducted a comprehensive review of these cases,” the DoJ announced, adding, “As a result of that review, the detainees were approved for transfer from Guantánamo Bay. On Aug. 6, 2009, in accordance with Congressionally-mandated reporting requirements, the Administration informed Congress of its intent to transfer these two detainees.”

The Justice Department was also keen to allay any fears that the men might pose any threat in future. “The transfers were carried out under an arrangement between the United States and the government of Portugal,” the press release stated, adding, “The United States has coordinated with the government of Portugal to ensure the transfers take place under appropriate security measures and will continue to consult with the government of Portugal regarding these detainees.”

To be honest, these caveats were unnecessary, as the Portuguese government would not have taken the men in the first place, and would certainly not have announced that they “are free people and are living in homes provided by the state,” if there had been any doubts about their insignificance. Moreover, their stories, as revealed in publicly available documents from Guantánamo, also reveal that neither man had any connection whatsoever to international terrorism, revealing, as so often before, that right-wing hysteria about those still held in the prison is largely hyperbole of a kind that, on close inspection, reveals more about the cowardice and xenophobia of those making the claims than it does about the majority of the prisoners themselves.

Mohammed al-Tumani: a story of persistent abuse

The younger of the two released men, Mohammed al-Tumani, who was just 18 years old when he arrived in Afghanistan in June 2001, has always maintained that he arrived as an immigrant with his entire family, and was seized by mistake with his father, Abdul Nasir al-Tumani, who is still held in Guantánamo. As I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files, based on the men’s accounts in their military tribunals:

The father had traveled to Afghanistan in1999 in search of work, finding a job in a restaurant in Kabul and bringing ten members of his family over in June 2001, including Mohammed, his grandmother and an eight-month old baby. Another six family members — his 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 al-Tumani 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.

Mohammed also said 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, Mohammed 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, as Carol Rosenberg described it in the Miami Herald, that during interrogation at Camp X-Ray (the rudimentary first prison at Guantánamo, which was closed in June 2002), “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.”

Beyond these alarming examples of abuse, which cannot be independently confirmed (but which certainly accord with claims made by many other prisoners), Mohammed al-Tumani’s story is also notable for a startling example of how allegations made by other prisoners were regarded as reliable evidence by the authorities at Guantánamo, even when, as in al-Tumani’s case, the veracity of these claims was undermined by military officers who had chosen to investigate the quality of the supposed evidence rather than accepting it at face value.

The baleful effects of Guantánamo’s notorious liar

As Corine Hegland explained in two ground-breaking articles for the National Journal in 2006 (“Guantánamo’s Grip” and “Empty Evidence”), Mohammed al-Tumani was one of two prisoners whose protestations regarding what they claimed were false allegations made against them by other prisoners were investigated by their enterprising Personal Representative. The Representatives were military officers appointed in place of lawyers in the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, the review boards established in 2004, which, as one former insider, Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham has explained, were designed primarily to rubberstamp the prisoners’ prior designation as “enemy combatants” who could be held without charge or trial.

In the case of Farouq Saif (identified by the Pentagon as Farouq Ali Ahmed), a Yemeni who was accused of guarding Osama bin Laden’s private airport in Kandahar by another Yemeni prisoner, his Personal Representative (a principled but unidentified Air Force Lieutenant Colonel) submitted a written protest after looking at Saif’s file and discovering that the government’s sole evidence that he had been at bin Laden’s airport was the statement of another prisoner, who, according to an FBI memo that he presented to the tribunal, was a notorious liar. According to the FBI, he “had lied, not only about Farouq, but about other Yemeni detainees as well. The other detainee claimed he had seen the Yemenis at times and in places where they simply could not have been.” Despite this, Saif was judged to be an “enemy combatant,” and is still held at Guantánamo.

In addition, Hegland also discussed how Mohammed al-Tumani had been ensnared by the informer’s lies, as I explained in an article in 2007:

In his tribunal, [al-Tumani] 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 — the same detainee mentioned above — 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.”

As with Farouq Saif, however, the Personal Representative’s protestations were in vain, because Mohammed al-Tumani was also 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, presumably, established that the evidence against him was unreliable. What has not been explained, however, is what happened in the cases of the other 58 men who were accused by the notorious liar, or why Mohammed’s father — whose circumstances seem to have been no different — was not cleared for release as well.

A Taliban foot soldier?

Less is known of the second man, Moammar Dokhan, who was 29 when he was captured on the Pakistani border, as he did not take part in any tribunals or review boards at Guantánamo. According to the Pentagon, he “traveled from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan with the stated intention of joining the Taliban,” “served as a rear-echelon guard and manned an observation post” near Bagram, and “carried a rifle while on duty at the observation post.”

With nothing else to rely on, the authorities tried to spice up this meager list with claims that “his name was contained on a list of incarcerated associates found on a computer used by suspected al-Qaeda members in Pakistan in early 2002,” and that his name “was contained on a list of captured mujahideen found in Pakistan on a hard drive associated with a high-ranking al-Qaeda operative,” although as I explained in a brief profile of Dokhan’s case last year:

It is not known if these two claims in fact refer to the same computer file, but neither provides proof of anything other than the fact that he was caught and imprisoned as a suspected militant. The “list,” as in the cases of many other prisoners, may have been nothing more than a report of the prisoners’ names, mentioned in the media or leaked by the men’s jailers, and it appears to be no more useful as evidence than the Bush administration’s claims that those in Guantánamo are “enemy combatants,” because the President decided, without the need for evidence, that that was the case.

Nevertheless, although the Taliban allegations indicate that Dokhan was, at best, nothing more than one of the lowliest Taliban recruits in an inter-Muslim civil war that predated the 9/11 attacks and had nothing to do with al-Qaeda (although Dokhan himself “denie[d] ever having been in Afghanistan”), it is surprising that Obama’s Task Force allowed him to be released, as, elsewhere, the Justice Department has been working overtime to prevent judges in the District Courts from granting the habeas corpus appeals of other prisoners whose connections to the Taliban have been no more pronounced, and, just last week, scored what appeared to be a rare victory when Judge Kollar-Kotelly ruled that a Kuwaiti prisoner, Fawzi al-Odah, could continue to be detained because the government had established, “by a preponderance of the evidence,” that he was probably involved with the Taliban and/or al-Qaeda.

Logic dictates that those who traveled to Afghanistan to serve with the Taliban are a different type of prisoner from those who were members of al-Qaeda, and were committed to plotting and pursuing terrorist attacks against the US and its allies, but logic was a rare commodity in the Bush administration, which chose instead to conflate al-Qaeda with the Taliban and to pack Guantánamo with men who knew nothing about Osama bin Laden or the 9/11 attacks, and had no involvement with terrorism. Moreover, the effects of this confusion linger to this day, as the Obama administration has chosen to maintain the same fiction that al-Qaeda and the Taliban are interchangeable, and the District Courts are also bound by this ludicrous lack of distinction.

We may never discover what the government’s secretive Guantánamo Review Task Force concluded about Moammar Dokhan (or, for that matter, about Mohammed al-Tumani), but by cutting through the hyperbole and granting these two men their freedom, the Portuguese government has just established that it has a clarity of vision that, with just four months to go until President Obama’s deadline for closing Guantánamo, remains sorely lacking in the United States.

Note: The photo of the Portuguese Parliament is by Rui Nogueira. Please also note that Mohammed al-Tumani was also identified in Guantánamo as Muhammed Khantumani, and his father as Abdul Nasser Khantumani, or Abd al-Nisr Khantumani.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

As published on the Huffington Post, CounterPunch, Antiwar.com and ZNet. 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).

Long-time readers of my work will know that I championed the cause of Mohamed Jawad, the Afghan prisoner released from Guantánamo on August 24, for nearly two years, from the moment that he was, ludicrously, put forward for a trial by Military Commission in October 2007. Jawad was charged with throwing a grenade that wounded two US soldiers and an Afghan translator in a marketplace in Kabul in December 2002, even though it was clear from his testimony alone that he was a teenager at the time of the attack, that he had been duped into joining an insurgent group, that he was drugged at the time of the attack, and that a confession had been coerced out of him while in Afghan custody. His case was also, at the time, the most obvious example of how the Bush administration, in its “War on Terror,” had warped existing war crimes legislation, and was attempting to claim that anyone who opposed US forces in a wartime situation was engaged not in legitimate warfare, but in a criminal enterprise.

Since then, I have assiduously covered the various twists and turns in his story, including, in particular, the crisis in the Commission system that was precipitated in September 2008, when his military prosecutor, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, resigned, declaring that the Commission system was unable to deliver justice, and explaining how he had gone from being a “true believer to someone who felt truly deceived,” the incidents in October and November 2008, when his military judge, Army Col. Stephen Henley, refused to accept the confessions made by Jawad shortly after his capture (both in Afghan and US custody), because they had been extracted through threats of torture, an explosive statement by Lt. Col. Vandeveld in January this year, to accompany Jawad’s habeas claim, in which the former prosecutor delivered an even more comprehensive denunciation of the Commissions’ systemic failures, his lawyers’ discovery in May that Jawad may have been as young as 12 when he was first seized, the savage denunciation of the government’s case that was delivered by Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle during his habeas corpus hearing in July, when she condemned the Justice Department for its persistent obstruction, and repeatedly stressed that the government did not have a single reliable witness, and that the case was “lousy,” “in trouble,” “unbelievable,” and “riddled with holes,” and statements to a Senate and House Committee in July by Lt. Col. Vandeveld and by Jawad’s military defense attorney, Lt. Col. David Frakt.

These not only provided the final word on the whole of the sordid story of Jawad’s imprisonment and ill-treatment, but also provided — in Frakt’s electrifying testimony, in particular — a comprehensive account of the fatally flawed genesis and development of the Commissions, which should have convinced the administration and the politicians that their proposal to revive the Commissions in a revised form is doomed to failure, and that they should be consigned to the scrap heap of history, along with every other innovation dreamt up by former Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisors.

I extend my belated congratulations to these brave and principled men and women for securing Mohamed Jawad’s release and for defending the values on which the United States prides itself, and am delighted to note that, on Jawad’s return, he was reunited with his family, and was even granted an audience with President Hamid Karzai, who offered to help the former refugee readjust to his new-found freedom by providing him with a house. The Associated Press reported that “Turbaned men, many who had traveled to Kabul from villages in a nearby province, greeted him with a flurry of hugs and wide smiles,” and added that Jawad, standing in a courtyard surrounded by family members, stated, “I am bursting out of my clothes. I spent a long time in prison and now I am very happy to be back with my family.” The London Times also reported that the Defence Minister, Abdul Rakhim Wardak, “offered to pay for him to study overseas,” following a statement by Jawad, in which he announced that he would like to study to become a doctor.

Below is a video from al-Jazeera (via YouTube) featuring a report on Jawad’s return and a brief interview. He also spoke to a number of other media representatives, including Jeremy Page of the London Times, who reported that Jawad “furrowed his brow and fidgeted nervously as he struggled to explain his extraordinary ordeal over the past seven years.” “This is one of the happiest moments in my life — to be back in Afghanistan after all this time,” he explained, adding, “I hadn’t done anything — they took me for nothing. All I could do was hope that one day I’d be free and back home in Afghanistan with my mother.”

Page noted that, when Jawad was finally reunited with his mother, “she refused initially to believe he was her son because he had changed so much, and fainted in a fit of hysterics,” according to Sher Khan Jalalkhil, a close friend of Mr. Jawad’s late father. Jalalkhil added, “Only when she came round and checked for a distinctive bump on the back of his head, did she embrace him as her offspring.” He also explained that the family had searched for Jawad for nine months after his initial disappearance. “We didn’t know if he had been killed, or kidnapped, or got lost. His mother went crazy,” he said, adding that they did not realize that he was in Guantánamo until a member of the International Committee of the Red Cross came to visit them.

At a press conference on August 27, one of Jawad’s lawyers, Marine Maj. Eric Montalvo, stated that Jawad planned to sue the US government for compensation for his long ordeal, although Jawad himself refused to elaborate. Maj. Montalvo explained that he “did not want any perceived anti-American statements to jeopardize his legal claim for compensation.” “If he starts speaking out in the coming days, he could put himself at risk,” Maj. Montalvo said. When he was asked if the “risk” referred to the US government, he said only that “it had not ended well” for other Guantánamo prisoners.

After his release, Jawad had privately described the abuse he had suffered in US custody, reinforcing the claims made by his lawyers, and by Lt. Col. Vandeveld. His uncle, Gul Nek, who met with him “for a long time” on the afternoon of his return, as the Associated Press described it, said that his nephew “recounted tales of torture by sleep deprivation,” and explained, “You can see in his face that he has been tortured.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

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