Guantánamo’s Lost Diaspora: How Donald Trump’s Closure of the Office Monitoring Ex-Prisoners is Bad for Them – and US Security

20.11.18

Four prisoners released from Guantanamo who have ended up in very different circumstances following the closure by Donald Trump of the office of the Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure. Clockwise from top left: Abu Wa'el Dhiab, Omar Mohammed Khalifh, Abd al-Malik al-Rahabi and Ravil Mingazov.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.




 

I wrote the following article, as “Guantánamo’s Lost Diaspora: How Donald Trump’s Closure of the Office Monitoring Ex-Prisoners Endangers U.S. National Security,” for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

The presence of Donald Trump in the White House has been an unmitigated disaster for anyone concerned about the ongoing existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and any notion of justice regarding those held there, or, indeed, those freed from the prison over the years.

For Trump, the notion that there might be anything wrong — or un-American — about imprisoning people forever without any meaningful form of due process clearly doesn’t exist. Since he took office nearly two years ago, only one prisoner has been released, out of the 41 men still held at the prison when Obama took office; and that man, Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi, was only released, and transferred to ongoing imprisonment in Saudi Arabia, because of a plea deal he agreed to in his military commission trial proceedings back in 2014.

Trump, clearly, has no desire to meaningfully continue the parole-type process — the Periodic Review Boards — that Barack Obama initiated to release lower-level prisoners who could demonstrate that they didn’t pose a threat to the U.S. Indeed, his contempt for the process is such that he has shut down any possibility of the two men whose release was approved by Obama’s PRBs, but who didn’t get released before Obama left office, being freed by shutting down the State Department office that dealt with resettlements — the office of the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure.

This was a move that also prevents three other men approved for release by an earlier review process, the Guantánamo Review Task Force, from being freed, but it also has wider ramifications, as the envoy’s office not only negotiated the release of prisoners (especially to third countries, when they couldn’t be safely repatriated), but also monitored released prisoners — benevolently, to try to ensure that they were being treated well, but also less benevolently, to try to ensure that no one released might end up doing anything to harm the U.S. or its interests.

We first reported the problems with the demise of the envoy’s office back in April 2017, and are pleased that it resurfaced again last week in a McClatchy Newspapers report by Carol Rosenberg, the indefatigable reporter who has been covering Guantánamo for the Miami Herald since the prison first opened, nearly 17 years ago.

Rosenberg’s article, “Trump closed an office that tracked ex-Gitmo inmates. Now we don’t know where some went,” began by focusing on the case of Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a troubled Syrian ex-prisoner who was re-settled in Uruguay four years ago, but then persistently sought to escape his new home. As Rosenberg explained, at Guantánamo “he was an incessant irritant to his American jailers — a committed hunger striker who underwent painful forced feedings to protest his detention without charge,” while in Uruguay he “never really settled, unlike the other five former detainees who were sent there with him. He organized protests outside the U.S. Embassy in Montevideo and resumed his hunger strikes there to protest separation from his family.”

Lee Wolosky, the second of Obama’s two envoys, told Rosenberg, “We worked pretty hard to make sure that he stayed in Uruguay in the Obama administration.” However, throughout that time, “Dhiab found his way to Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela and at one point on a flight to South Africa, only to be sent back to Uruguay through U.S. intervention.” In 2017, after Obama left office, “he also used a forged passport to fly to Morocco, which returned him to Uruguay.”

Jose Gonzalez, an “executive adviser to Uruguay’s Interior Minister,” told McClatchy that, for his latest escape, Dhiab “walked across the Uruguay-Brazilian border, took a bus to Sao Paolo and caught a flight to Turkey. The Turkish Embassy in Washington said a search of Interior Ministry records found no evidence that he had arrived there.” Since then, however, he “has been detected in south central Turkey where he has slipped in and out of the rebel held Idlib province, controlled by the al-Qaida affiliate al Nusra Front, according to a Syrian diplomatic source, citing Syrian intelligence.” It was also explained that his mother “is receiving medical care in Turkey.”

In one telling anecdote, Wolosky explained why Donald Trump’s dismissive attitude to the office of the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure was so troubling. He “said he had been receiving phone calls from foreign envoys and other concerned people — even though he left government at the close of the Obama administration — because ‘they have no one to talk to in the U.S. government.’”

He described the disappearance of Dhiab as “particularly worrisome,” noting, “He was not only damaged but he was someone who I thought was dangerous.”

That remains to be seen, as it always seemed to me that Dhiab, whose case I have studied closely for many years, was more of a threat to himself than anyone else, but at least his situation seems to have awakened some people within the Trump administration to the threat posed by shutting down the envoy’s office.

An aide at the House Foreign Affairs Committee anonymously told McClatchy that Syria was “the worst place for an angry [former detainee] to turn up.” U.S. intelligence and State Department officials, meanwhile, “would not discuss Dhiab’s whereabouts,” although a spokesperson, Alexander Vagg, said that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently instructed the Counterterrorism Bureau to start addressing “any issues stemming from the arrangements made between the Obama administration and foreign partners regarding the resettlement of former Guantánamo Bay detainees.”

Other problems with the closure of the envoy’s office

While George W. Bush had few meaningful deals involving security issues that were put in place for former prisoners, the Obama administration “took a different approach to detainee transfers,” as Carol Rosenberg described it, adding that Obama and his officials “negotiated deals with 30 countries to take in men who could not be sent to their home countries because of domestic instability or poor human rights records, generally in small numbers and with specifically fashioned social welfare arrangements.” As Rosenberg also put it, “Terms of the deals have never been made public but Obama administration officials said the host countries would provide housing, living stipends and language classes if necessary to help them adapt. As a rule, the host countries agreed to not provide them travel documents for their first two years.”

As Rosenberg also explained, “By the time Trump took office, the State Department special envoy office had sent 142 men to 30 nations for rehabilitation, resettlement or safe haven — and another 52 back to their homelands. Most of the resettled captives went to Europe, Africa and Persian Gulf nations.”

However, after Trump became president, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson closed the envoy’s office and “assigned the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs to handle any problems that arose in the transfers” — a move that House Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.), called “ineffective,” according to the committee aide who spoke to Rosenberg. Then, as she put it, “deals with some third countries began to unravel.”

In April, as reported here, here, here, here and here, Senegal repatriated two former prisoners from Libya who had been taken in two years previously, “declaring,” as McClatchy put it, that “it was done with its obligation to host them.”

As I had noted, one of the two men, Omar Khalifa Mohammed Abu Bakr (aka Omar Mohammed Khalifh, but described by McClatchy as Awad Khalifa), was desperately afraid of being repatriated. On return, the two men vanished, and Khalifa’s attorney, Ramzi Kassem, said that “efforts to locate Khalifa through ‘the United Nations and other entities’ have failed.” Kassem added, as McClatchy put it, that, “Had Khalifa known he could be forcibly returned to Libya [he] would have refused to leave Guantánamo in April 2016.” As Kassem put it, “As horrible as Guantánamo is, and it is horrible, my client has good reason to fear that Libya would be even worse.”

In May, following a Washington Post article, we reported how 23 men released from Guantánamo in 2016 but sent to the United Arab Emirates, where they were supposed to be put through a rehabilitation program, have instead “disappeared into what their American attorneys now believe to be a detention setting,” as McClatchy put it. Gary Thompson, an attorney “who has tried to check on his client, Ravil Mingazov, an ethnic Tatar from Russia and a former Red Army ballet dancer who fled his homeland in 2000 and was captured in Pakistan two years later,” told McClatchy, “They’re incommunicado.” Thompson explained how Mingazov, despite being approved for release, had “feared persecution as a Muslim if he returned to his homeland,” but, as he added, “Of course our current State Department could not care less and our own country is checked out. That leaves Ravil and these other detainees entirely at the mercy of the UAE government.”

Lawyers for all 23 men sent a letter to the UAE’s foreign minister in Abu Dhabi in February, urging the men to be allowed “to safely rebuild their lives in the UAE.” However, they have not received a reply.

McClatchy also had updates that we didn’t know about. Five former prisoners were sent to Kazakhstan in December 2014, but only two are left. Their lawyers told McClatchy that they “felt isolated with no prospects for assimilation in the non-Arabic speaking society,” and although one of the five, a Yemeni, “died of kidney failure from a longstanding illness soon after he arrived,” two Tunisians “relocated to Mauritania with the assistance of the International Red Cross” after the Guantánamo envoy’s office was closed, as attorney Mark Denbeaux, who represented one of the men, explained. Carol Rosenberg added that State Department officials “would not comment on whether they were even aware of the transfer.”

Carol Rosenberg also noted that only four out of a total of eight prisoners sent to Slovakia by the Obama administration between 2010 and 2014 “are believed to still be there but the government did not respond to emails asking how many left and where they went,” while the State Department “likewise declined to discuss individual detainee transfer cases.”

One of the eight, Rafiq Alhami (described by McClatchy as Rafik al Hami), “returned to his native Tunisia in a repatriation that was worked [out] with the Obama administration,” as I discussed at the time. Once there, however, he “fell into a deep depression and disappeared,” according to Mark Denbeaux, who was also his attorney. He then reportedly ended up in Syria, where he was killed.

Fortunately, as Carol Rosenberg explained, “not every deal had a bad ending.”

As she explained, the Obama administration “sent 18 former Uighur prisoners — former Chinese citizens whom a federal court found unlawfully detained by the U.S. military — across the globe to get them out of Guantánamo. Six were sent to the East Pacific nation of Palau, and moved on to Turkey with advance notice to the State Department. Two left El Salvador in 2013, also likely for Turkey, with notice to the United States.”

Dan Fried, the first of the Guantánamo envoys, said that “when he negotiated the Uighur transfers the Bush administration had ‘already conceded’ they were held unlawfully so there was no legal need to restrict their movements.” However, with the other deals, as he put it, “one of the downsides of abolishing the Gitmo office is there was nobody in the State Department assigned to actually follow up. It may have sounded like a good idea to somebody. But who’s in charge of contacting, liaising the governments to find out what’s going on?”

One final story concerns the Yemeni Abdul Malik Wahab al-Rahabi, who was sent to Montenegro in June 2016, five months after another Yemeni was sent there. He “described it as ‘a beautiful, beautiful’ welcoming country, so much so that they helped him bring his wife and teenage daughter to join him,” but “the language was too hard for his daughter, making it impossible for her to further her education. And his wife missed the company of fellow Arabic speakers.”

The two-year stipend and housing provided by the government of Montenegro was running out, al-Rahabi told McClatchy, adding that he couldn’t find a job. As McClatchy put it, “He had hoped to make a living by selling artwork he took with him from Guantánamo, but his Twitter marketing campaign didn’t work out.” He then arranged to move to Sudan, and, once an agreement was in place, “Montenegro brought me this travel document for refugees. Like a passport, you know,” he said by phone from Sudan. “I said, please make sure to ask the United States if there is no problem with me if I travel. I don’t want to go to Guantánamo or another prison.”

As McClatchy described it, al-Rahabi said that the government of Montenegro “notified the U.S. Embassy, which did not object, and then bought tickets for his family,” adding, “They traveled to Khartoum via Istanbul in a journey that he described as both scary and thrilling. It was his first unshackled flight in nearly two decades, one where he could both look out a window and listen.”

“I was afraid maybe in the airport they would refuse, tell me no. But they gave me a visa for me and my daughter and my wife,” al-Rahabi said. In Sudan, he added, “he has found other Yemenis who can’t go home to the civil war torn nation.”

He also said, “Life here is so difficult,” and explained that “he has yet to find work — or sell the art he took from Cuba to the Balkans to Northeast Africa.” However, as he also said, “it is good for another side for me and my family. Same language, same culture, it’s easy to get close with the people, buy something, go there and there and speak with everyone.”

In contrast to al-Rahabi’s openness and fundamental optimism, Carol Rosenberg noted, “Neither Trump State Department officials nor U.S. intelligence would comment on whether they were aware of the move.”

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

21 Responses

  1. Andy Worthington says...

    When I posted this on Facebook, I wrote:

    Here’s my latest article – an examination of the ramifications of Donald Trump’s decision to shut down the State Department office of the Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure. The office dealt with resettling prisoners in third countries who could not be safely repatriated, as well as monitoring them afterwards, but an unintended consequence of Trump’s lack of interest in the envoy’s role – because he has no interest in releasing anyone from Guantanamo – is that it is also endangering the lives of these ex-prisoners, as well as endangering US national security, because there is now literally no one in the US government to liaise with other countries regarding ex-prisoners.

    The article, following up on an article by veteran Guantanamo journalist Carol Rosenberg, is cross-posted from Close Guantanamo​, where I published it yesterday, and it focuses on the stories of prisoners released in Uruguay, Senegal, the UAE, Kazakhstan, Slovakia and Montenegro.

  2. Andy Worthington says...

    Pam Arnold wrote:

    Thanks, they are all judged guilty of course whether they are guilty or not .. the orange jump suit says it all .. it is unbelievable that their freedom is just another prison

  3. Andy Worthington says...

    Yes, the situation facing the men sent to the UAE is particularly bad, Pam. I’m going to try and find out more about what’s going on – although nothing is as bad as the story of the Libyan who thought he was safe in Senegal – Omar Mohammed Khalifh, top right in the photo.

  4. Andy Worthington says...

    Pam Arnold wrote:

    He said he would rather stay in Guantanamo than go to Libya .. so they sent him to Libya of course ..

  5. Andy Worthington says...

    It’s so depressing, Pam. Back in 2010, Omar Deghayes told me about Omar Mohammed Khalifh, his friend, held together with bits of metal, who was known as “the General” because he’d been unable to resist the relentless interrogations, and had confessed to everything they’d thrown at him, even though none of it was true.

  6. Andy Worthington says...

    Mansoor Adayfi wrote:

    The truth is that some countries are hired to do the dirty work for the US government. We are being treated even worse than Guantanamo. At Guantanamo we were fighting for our freedom but now we are fighting for our lives.

  7. Andy Worthington says...

    I am so sorry to hear that, Mansoor. I had hoped your situation might improve the more your story was publicized – via the New York Times, the article you wrote for Close Guantanamo, and Erin’s fundraiser: https://www.gofundme.com/support-mansoor039s-guantanamo-memoir
    https://www.closeguantanamo.org/Articles/301-WORLD-EXCLUSIVE-The-Kind-Father-Brother-and-Friend-for-All-at-Guantanamo-by-Mansoor-Adayfi

  8. Andy Worthington says...

    Natalia R Scott wrote:

    It’s one of the many atrocious things he’s done … it’s unbelievable to think this hell keeps on going for these men and former detainees who have had no justice for what was done to them.

  9. Andy Worthington says...

    Yes, absolutely, Natalia. I can’t think of much worse than leaving a horrendous prison like Guantanamo only to find oneself still fundamentally imprisoned.

  10. Andy Worthington says...

    Natalia R Scott wrote:

    Andy it breaks my heart to think of them.

  11. Andy Worthington says...

    Me too, Natalia. I’m going to try and follow up on some of these stories, but what we can do is so limited when Trump has done such an effective job of actually shutting down the parts of the government that dealt with issues like these – and many others, sadly.

  12. Andy Worthington says...

    Natalia R Scott wrote:

    Andy it’s a difficult job, right? Following these stories. I admire you a lot.

  13. Andy Worthington says...

    Thanks, Natalia, but I do think in general that I’ve found myself rather defeated by Trump, along with so many other people. It’s harder than ever to get people motivated by the persistent injustice of Guantanamo.

  14. Andy Worthington says...

    Natalia R Scott wrote:

    Andy I’m always here, for what it’s worth. You and them will always have our support.

  15. Andy Worthington says...

    Yes, you and some of the other dedicated opponents of Guantanamo who have been following my work for years, Natalia! Thanks as ever!

  16. Andy Worthington says...

    Benji Ashby wrote:

    For Trump it is all a case of mind over matter, he doesn’t mind because they don’t matter.

  17. Andy Worthington says...

    It seems to me that his very ability to think is quite profoundly limited, Benji. Like a lumbering blob of barely sentient orange lard, he sees Guantanamo and thinks “terrorists bad, never let them go”, without any ability to ask questions about the nature of imprisoning people without charge or trial.

  18. Andy Worthington says...

    Mansoor Adayfi wrote, in response to 7, above:

    Thank you Andy. As my brother say, “we just moved from one block to another one”.

  19. Andy Worthington says...

    Again, I am so sorry to hear that, Mansoor. It is, sadly, a profound indictment of the way in which the Obama administration so often failed to consider how people would adapt to being resettled third countries without Muslim populations or adequate support networks for people traumatised by their experiences at Guantanamo. And, of course, under Trump it’s even worse, as there is no one to take responsibility for cases like yours. I hope some outlet in the US media will be publishing some more of your writing soon. If I can help out at all, please let me know.

  20. Andy Worthington says...

    Pam Arnold wrote:

    The world knows that most confessions are false and extracted under coercion, and useless to anybody and America calls itself civilised, it never has been.

  21. Andy Worthington says...

    The US tried to shift the goalposts after 9/11, Pam, and while you’re right about how most of the rest of the world sees it, the post-9/11 changes have met with some considerable success internally, given how many Americans support the existence of Guantanamo and consider that torture is somehow necessary.

Leave a Reply

Back to the top

Back to home page

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. Also, photo-journalist (The State of London), and singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers).
Email Andy Worthington

CD: Love and War

The Four Fathers on Bandcamp

The Guantánamo Files book cover

The Guantánamo Files

The Battle of the Beanfield book cover

The Battle of the Beanfield

Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion book cover

Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion

Outside The Law DVD cover

Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo

RSS

Posts & Comments

World Wide Web Consortium

XHTML & CSS

WordPress

Powered by WordPress

Designed by Josh King-Farlow

Please support Andy Worthington, independent journalist:

Archives

In Touch

Follow me on Facebook

Become a fan on Facebook

Subscribe to me on YouTubeSubscribe to me on YouTube

The State of London

The State of London. 16 photos of London

Andy's Flickr photos

Campaigns

Categories

Tag Cloud

Abu Zubaydah Al-Qaeda Andy Worthington British prisoners Center for Constitutional Rights CIA torture prisons Close Guantanamo Donald Trump Four Fathers Guantanamo Housing crisis Hunger strikes London Military Commission NHS NHS privatisation Periodic Review Boards Photos President Obama Reprieve Shaker Aamer The Four Fathers Torture UK austerity UK protest US courts Video We Stand With Shaker WikiLeaks Yemenis in Guantanamo