Guantánamo: Who Are The Two Uighurs Freed in El Salvador, and Why Are 87 Men Cleared for Release Still Held?

21.4.12

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As published on the “Close Guantánamo” website. Please join us — just an email address required.

With no fanfare — just an announcement on its website — the Pentagon informed the world on Thursday that two Uighur prisoners at Guantánamo, held for over ten years but recognized as innocent almost from the moment of their capture, had been freed in El Salvador. As the Pentagon helpfully explained, the two men “were subject to release from Guantánamo as a result of a court order issued on October 7, 2008 by the US District Court for the District of Columbia,” and it was also noted that they “are voluntarily resettling in El Salvador.”

The Pentagon also noted, “As directed by the President’s January 22, 2009, executive order, the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force conducted a comprehensive review of these cases,” and, as a result, they “were designated for transfer by unanimous consent among all six agencies on the task force.”

The release of these men is most welcome, because, primarily as a result of deliberate Congressional obstruction, no living prisoner has left Guantánamo for 15 months — the longest period without any releases in the prison’s ten-year history. The last living prisoner to leave Guantánamo was an Algerian, Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, who won his habeas corpus petition and was repatriated, against his will, in January 2011, but the last two men to leave the prison had actually left in coffins, having died in the prison in February and May last year.

In addition, to say that the release of these two men was long overdue would be an understatement. Twenty-two Uighurs (Turkic Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province) were initially held in Guantánamo — refugees from oppression, who had been living in a rundown settlement in Afghanistan’s mountains, and who were swept up in the “war on terror” and had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Five were freed in Albania in 2006, while George W. Bush was still President, and the administration accepted that it was unsafe to return them to China, but the 17 other men — including the two released in El Salvador — had to wait until 2008 for the Bush administration to drop its claims that any of them were “enemy combatants.”

When Judge Ricardo Urbina ordered their release on October 7, 2008, after granting their habeas corpus petitions, he intended for them to be resettled in the U.S., but the Bush administration appealed, the D.C. Circuit Court issued a stay, and the full court, backed by President Obama’s Justice Department, ruled against Judge Urbina — and the Uighurs — in February 2009, claiming that immigration issues could not be decided by the courts. White House Counsel Greg Craig then initiated a plan to resettle some of the men on the US mainland, but this was shot down by President Obama when Republicans got wind of it, and threatened to cause him political difficulties.

While the Uighurs appealed to the Supreme Court, the Obama administration pulled out all the stops to find other countries that would take them. Four went to Bermuda in June 2009, six more went to the Pacific island of Palau in October 2009, and two others went to Switzerland in March 2010. However, the five who remained were let down by the Supreme Court, and seemed to be stranded permanently in Guantánamo, because they had turned down offers of resettlement in other countries, fearing that they would not be safe from the reach of the Chinese government.

Although the Pentagon did not release the names of the two men, Sabin Willett, a Boston-based attorney who “helped represent both men at various stages of their habeas corpus lawsuits,” told the New York Times that they were Ahmed Mohamed (also identified as Hammad Memet and Hammad Mohammed) and Abdul Razak (whose full name is Abdul Razak Qadir). He added that Mohamed “wants to become a salesman or merchant in El Salvador.”

Willett also said that “Salvadoran officials visited Guantánamo and interviewed both men more than a year ago,” and explained that although at one point the two men “grew frustrated and fired their legal team,” the lawyers “continued to help informally in interactions between them and the government.”

The two men had both been in the settlement in the Afghan mountains when it was bombed by US forces following the US-led invasion in October 2001, and had then fled, eventually ending up in Pakistan, where villagers welcomed them, but then sold them to US forces.

Abdul Razak Qadir, a former businessman, who had sold fabrics and animal skins in his homeland, is in his mid-thirties, and was single at the time of his capture. He was recently profiled for “Close Guantánamo” by his lawyer, Seema Saifee, who explained that, when his business proved too difficult to sustain, and he fell into debt, he was told about the settlement in Afghanistan, and traveled there. Saifee explained that he was “paid a monthly salary if he purchased food and clothing in the markets of Jalalabad and delivered them” to the settlement. In Guantánamo, Yusef Abbas, one of the three Uighurs still held, stated that Abdul Razak had also worked at the hospital in Jalalabad and took care of him after he was wounded when the settlement was bombed, until “there was a riot in the city” and he returned to the other Uighurs in the mountains, taking Abdul Razak with him, and then fleeing to Pakistan.

In Guantánamo, he found the isolation and the lack of care difficult to endure, and as one of his compatriots explained in a letter in December 2007:

My countryman Abdulrazaq used to have rheumatism for a while, and since he came to Camp 6 it got worse. Sometime in early August, the US army told Abdulrazaq that he was cleared to be released, and also issued the release form to him in writing. As a result, Abdulrazaq requested to move to a camp that had better conditions, for health reasons. When his request was ignored he embarked on a hunger strike, which has lasted for over a month now.

Currently, he is on punishment and his situation is even worse. He is shackled to the restraint chair and force-fed twice a day by the guards, who wear glass shields on their faces. This has taken place for the past 20 days. For someone who has not eaten for a long time, such treatment is not humane. Abdulrazaq would never want to go on hunger strike. However, the circumstances here forced him to do so, as he had no other choice. If the oppression was not unbearable, who would want to throw himself on a burning fire? In the US constitution, is it a crime for someone to ask to protect his health and to ask for his rights? If it does count as a crime, then what is the difference between the US constitution and the Communist constitution? What is the difference between this and Hitler’s policies during the Second World War?

Ahmed Mohamed, born in 1978, had left his homeland because of the discrimination against Uighurs in 1994, and had lived in Kyrgyzstan, and, for nearly two years, in Egypt, before returning to Kyrgyzstan in 1997, where a neighbor eventually told him about the settlement in the Afghan mountains. At Guantánamo, he explained, as did many of his compatriots, that he had only one enemy — the Chinese government. “The Chinese people have tortured and pressured the Uighur people really bad,” he said. “The Uighur people are trying to go all over the world now. One sixth of the world’s population is in China. They are a threat to the whole world. If I have such a large enemy, why would I go and fight with another enemy?”

The US authorities alleged that he was a weapons instructor, but in his tribunal he called one of his compatriots as a witness, who explained, “I saw that he was sick during that time. He has a stomach problem and he was helping with the kitchen work and helping the cook. He was also studying the language.” Although his tribunal cleared him for release in 2004, concluding that he was not an “enemy combatant,” he was one of an unknown number of prisoners subjected to “do-over” tribunals. These were convened in secret in Washington D.C. with different military officers — often on more than one occasion — until they delivered the desired verdict, and in Mohammed’s case he was not finally vindicated until 2008.

Nevertheless, although the release of these two men is to be welcomed unconditionally, the three Uighurs who are still held must not be forgotten, and nor must the other 84 men, of the 169 still held, who were also cleared for release by the Guantánamo Review Task Force.

Although the identities of the cleared men have not been officially released, it appears that they also include Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, who should be returned to his family in the UK without further delay, and other men in need of resettlement, like the Uighurs. One of these is Djamel Ameziane, profiled last week, an Algerian whose case has been taken up by the the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

Other candidates — not cleared, or not necessarily cleared — include Afghans like Shawali Khan and Abdul Ghani, whose pointless detention should have been highlighted in recent discussions about releasing a handful of Taliban leaders as part of the peace process in Afghanistan, and Fayiz al-Kandari and Fawzi al-Odah, the last two Kuwaitis, whose ongoing detention only confirms the distortions of justice still in force at Guantánamo, and whose return would be welcomed by the Kuwaiti government, a strong ally of the US in the Gulf, but one whose Parliamentarians have been unafraid to speak out recently, and to call for the return from Guantánamo of their remaining citizens.

In addition, we know from the Task Force’s report that 58 of these men are Yemenis, and at some point the moratorium on releasing any Yemenis — announced by President Obama in January 2010, in the heat of the hysteria that greeted the news that the failed plane bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had been recruited in Yemen — must be lifted, or Obama’s legacy will be one in which, for long years, if not forever, decisions to release prisoners meant nothing, and everyone was actually subjected to arbitrary detention.

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, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” 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 67 prisoners released from February 2009 to January 2011, 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 (herehere 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 (herehere 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 Somalis4 Afghans6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland1 Egyptian1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini); July 2010 — 1 Algerian1 Syrian to Cape Verde, 1 Uzbek to Latvia, 1 unidentified Afghan to Spain; September 2010 — 1 Palestinian, 1 Syrian to Germany; January 2011 — 1 Algerian.


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26 Responses

  1. Andy Worthington says...

    These are comments from Facebook on Thursday evening, when I first posted the news about the release of the men, and also from Friday:

    Mary Shepard wrote:

    Wonderful news, but sad that it took so long to release these two men.

  2. Andy Worthington says...

    Amy Reger wrote:

    such a shame that they have to be transferred to El Salvador and not the U.S.

  3. Andy Worthington says...

    Elise Hendrick wrote:

    That’s how much a court order in the US is worth – you can defy it for three years and still not be held in contempt.

  4. Andy Worthington says...

    Hekmat Hasanoff wrote:

    Great news, I am also Uighur, I feel really happy to hear this news.

  5. Andy Worthington says...

    Martin Gugino wrote:

    It is a miracle.

  6. Andy Worthington says...

    Mui JS wrote:

    Hallelulah. It’s about time.

  7. Andy Worthington says...

    Zilma Nunes wrote:

    finally..namaste.

  8. Andy Worthington says...

    Thanks, everyone, for your thoughts and contributions.

  9. Andy Worthington says...

    Beverly Hendricks wrote:

    I’m happy for them, but how horrible those lost years.

  10. Andy Worthington says...

    Yes, indeed, Beverly. Good to hear from you.

  11. Andy Worthington says...

    Beverly Hendricks wrote:

    Thanks, Andy. It’s been a while (since I’ve commented). I’m still appreciating all your work, including your filling us in on what’s been happening to NHS in the UK. It fills me with horror to think that the nasty, US health insurers are setting their sights on a potential British market, and fills me with self-disgust that I once urged British friends to vote Liberal Democrat.

    You and your work came up at the table I sat at at the NCPCF (National Committee to Protect Civil Freedoms) banquet in Springfield, Virginia last Sunday. It was great to discuss your work with people who knew exactly who you are and the significance of the work you are doing documenting the individual cases of Guantanamo prisoners and advocating on their behalf.

  12. Andy Worthington says...

    Thanks again, Beverly. To be honest, no one knew what would happen to the Lib Dems when they were presented with the opportunity to be in government with the Tories. Obviously, they’re dead as a political force as a result of capitulating over the university funding issue, and failing to ditch the NHS bill, and, most of all, through Nick Clegg appearing to be Cameron’s poodle.
    And I’m very glad indeed to hear about your banquet last week, and about people knowing about my work. It’s great to know that the message is getting out!

  13. Andy Worthington says...

    Beverly Hendricks wrote:

    While in London I knew people with the Lib Dems who were absolutely sincere in their wish to provide a truly liberal, alternative to the hugely compromised Labour party. A friend, back then, a LD councilman in one of the London boroughs, described their political ideal to me as a “George McGovern type”, which resonated with me as GM was, from my childhood, the favorite Presidential candidate of my lifetime. (Not electable though, sadly). Since then I’ve lost all faith in traditional American parties, which makes me all the sadder to think how betrayed many LD members must now feel, and the tremendous setback to the concept of a third party in the UK.

  14. Andy Worthington says...

    I agree, but, beyond the Lib Dem capitulation demonstrating so clearly how power corrupts, I think that we need a whole new political movement – one that involves socialist ideals reengineered for a new era.

  15. Andy Worthington says...

    Beverly Hendricks wrote:

    I agree.

  16. Andy Worthington says...

    Josie Setzler wrote:

    El Salvador? It has been the moral responsibility of the United States to accept these innocent men into the United States and prevent many years of unjust and needless suffering.

  17. Andy Worthington says...

    I agree about the moral responsibility, Josie, although shamefully the Obama Justice Department and the DC Circuit Court disagreed. As it happens, though, without further investigation, I couldn’t say whether or not the men would have wanted to be resettled in the country that abused them so horribly. Certainly, some of the Uighurs didn’t want to live in the US after all that happened to them.

  18. tony says...

    Thankx Andy, Pakistan is not in the list, I think you don’t consider Pakistanis worthwhile. Why is Pakistan left out, Include pakistan in the list.

  19. Andy Worthington says...

    Hi Tony,
    I didn’t mention a lot of countries, so I wasn’t ignoring Pakistan in particular. There are only a few Pakistanis still held, and they’re all regarded as significant – or “high-value” – prisoners, so there seems to be little chance that any of them are on the list of prisoners eligible (theoretically at least) for release.

  20. U.S. transfers two Uighur detainees to El Salvador | What The Folly?! says...

    […] a result, 87 of the 169 detainees that remain at Guantanamo continue to languish at the detention center years after they have been […]

  21. tony says...

    Andy, baby you misunderstood me, i am talking about the petition “As published on the “Close Guantánamo” website. Please join us — just an email address required”. Pakistan is not in this list. 😀

  22. tony says...

    Now it is in the list, people from pakistan can sign too, but they are not too sympathetic to this issue.

  23. Andy Worthington says...

    Tony, anyone from Pakistan — or anywhere else in the world — can sign the petition on the Care 2 Petition Site calling for the release from Guantanamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/shaker-aamerguantanamo-bay/
    I hope we will be launching a general worldwide petition to close Guantanamo in the not too distant future.

  24. Ayub says...

    God helps you guys, i’m happy to hear that you came out that black cage.
    Allah with you guys.

  25. Andy Worthington says...

    Thanks for the comments, Ayub.

  26. Eloquent but Unconvincing: President Obama’s Response to the Guantánamo Hunger Strike | IWDTV says...

    […] Just four prisoners have been released since Congress first imposed restrictions 16 months ago — two Uighurs through the court order back in 2008, and two others because of plea deals negotiated in their […]

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Andy Worthington

Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker, singer/songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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