Wonderful News as Eleven Men Are Freed from Guantánamo and Resettled in Oman

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. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

 

In what will forever be remembered as a truly significant day in Guantánamo’s long and sordid history, the Biden administration has freed eleven Yemeni prisoners, flying them from Guantánamo to Oman to resume their lives after more than two decades without charge or trial in US custody; mostly at Guantánamo, but in some cases for several years previously in CIA “black sites.”

All eleven men had been held for between two and four years since they were unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes, and, in one outlying case, for 15 years.

A deal to release them in Oman had been arranged in October 2023, but had been cancelled at the last minute, when a plane was already on the runway, because of what was described, when the story broke last May, as the “political optics” of freeing them when the attacks in southern Israel had just taken place — although Carol Rosenberg, writing for the New York Times about the releases yesterday, suggested that “congressional objections led the Biden administration to abort the mission.”

Rosenberg also explained that, when the resettlement plan was aborted in October 2023, the prisoners “had already undergone exit interviews with representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and guards had taken away the personal belongings that would travel with them”, and it is difficult to imagine how crushing the disappointment must have been when their long-glimpsed freedom was withdrawn at the last moment.

Yesterday’s news belatedly makes amends for that disappointment, as well as providing a rare, positive aspect for President Biden’s legacy. It is also a fitting  tribute to Tina Kaidanow, a former ambassador who had been appointed, by Biden, as the Special Representative for Guantánamo Affairs in August 2021, “responsible for all matters pertaining to the transfer of detainees from the Guantánamo Bay facility to third countries.”

Ms. Kaidanow had arranged the resettlement deal, and, as Carol Rosenberg explained, she “kept the deal viable through negotiations, travel and meetings both within the United States government and with the receiving country”, according to a State Department official. Sadly, she died in October, without ever having seen all of her hard work bear fruit.

I’ve been specifically campaigning for these men’s release for two years, via posters showing how disgracefully long they had been held since the decisions were taken to approve them for release. I updated these posters every month, and publicized them as part of the global coordinated monthly vigils for the closure of Guantánamo that I established in February 2023, taking place across the US and around the world.

I did so because it was apparent to me that the Biden administration might not prioritize freeing them, because they were under no legal obligation to do so. This was because the review processes used to approve them for release, established under President Obama, were purely administrative, meaning that their release was, in quite a fundamental manner, purely at the whim of the executive branch, a situation that wasn’t supposed to happen in a country founded on the basis of overthrowing the executive overreach of a British king nearly 250 years ago.

The fact that the mainstream media took no interest in this stands as a black mark against them, although it is, sadly, all too typical, as they have rarely shown much interest in the many crimes committed in their name at what, for many years, has been the last bastion of the brutal lawlessness of the “war on terror” declared by the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks.

This was in spite of the fact that, in 2023, various UN Special Rapporteurs and Working Groups specifically condemned the Biden administration for continuing to run a facility where arbitrary detention was rife, and where the mechanisms for imprisonment constituted cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, possibly rising to the level of torture, and also possibly involved crimes against humanity.

After Biden lost the election to Donald Trump, the pressure to secure the release of these men before he left office became an increasingly urgent priority for campaigners, because otherwise they would be entombed alive again at Guantánamo, as they were during Trump’s first term in office.

I worked with other campaigners on letters to Biden that were signed by 140 academics, politicians, rights organizations and former prisoners, but in the end, I’m glad to note, when four prisoners were released last month, including two men long approved for release, it became apparent that, behind the scenes, Biden administration officials had been working on their release for many months, as was the case, it now seems clear, with the revival of the Oman resettlement deal, with all of these arrangements having followed on from the years of work that Tina Kaidanow had put into fulfilling the difficult job that she had been been presented with.

So who are the eleven men freed?

Because of the general indifference of the mainstream media to the identities of the men held at Guantánamo, it seems unlikely that much media reporting will shine a light on who these men are who were held for over two decades without charge or trial. In an attempt to pierce the shadows of indifference, I published profiles of them earlier this year, so please follow the links for their stories, presented in more detail than you will find anywhere else — Uthman Abd Al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman, Hani Saleh Rashid Abdullah, Tawfiq Al-Bihani, Abdulsalam Al-Hela and Sharqawi Al-Hajj, Moath Al-Alwi and Zakaria Al-Baidany, Suhayl Al-Sharabi, Khaled Qassim, Hassan Bin Attash and Sanad Al-Kazimi.

They include two artists — one of whom, Moath Al-Alwi, has transcended the media’s general indifference to become well-known internationally, at least in artistic circles, because of his talent for building impressive three-dimensional sailing ships out of recycled materials. The other artist, Khaled Qassim (aka Khaled Qasim), has kept a lower profile, but his sculptural work and his heavily lacquered paintings — often slyly politicized — have also attracted interest from artists worldwide. Drawn to his story, I wrote and recorded a song about him, “Forever Prisoner”, which you can listen to here.

The others include Abdulsalam Al-Hela, a prominent businessman and tribal leader in Yemen whose unjust imprisonment, after being kidnapped on a business trip to Egypt, attracted vast crowds of supporters in his home country; Tawfiq Al-Bihani, approved for release 15 years ago, who was meant to be freed eight years ago, but was kept off a plane at the last minute, with no explanation ever provided: Zakaria Al-Baidany, kidnapped by Russians in Georgia, who was not in touch with his family for the first 14 years of his imprisonment; and Hassan Bin Attash, the younger brother of one of the men still held, accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Hassan was just 17 years old when he was first seized and sent to be tortured in Jordan, but his entire ordeal, taking up well over half his life, essentially only came about because of a presumed guilt by association.

Please do read the profiles to find out more about these men, because they deserve more than the dehumanization to which they have been so persistently subjected for so long by their US captors. All have — or had — hopes and dreams, and many, if not all, have striven to salvage something positive from their horrendous experiences, which many of us, I’m sure, find hard to imagine.

Who is still held?

With these releases, just 15 men are still held at Guantánamo, although others ought to be freed before Biden leaves office, because three of these 15 — Muieen Abd Al-Sattar, a stateless Rohingya, Guled Hassan Duran, a Somali, and Ismail Ali Bakush, a Libyan — have also long been approved for release; for 15 years, in the case of Muieen Abd Al-Sattar, who has refused to engage with the authorities, and has never even been represented by an attorney.

The US government also continues to hold three “forever prisoners” — men never charged, but not approved for release either. The Biden administration should have taken steps to resolve the cases of these three men, and its failure to do so means that the lingering taint of holding men indefinitely without charge or trial will continue to leech its poison into the US’s future, as it also will if the three men long approved for release are not freed in the next 12 days.

Two of the “forever prisoners” are relatively unknown — Abu Faraj Al-Libi, a Libyan, and Muhammad Rahim, an Afghan, both held as “high-value detainees” and previously imprisoned in CIA “black sites” — but the third is a cause célèbre in the field of the US’s abuse of human rights in the “war on terror”: Abu Zubaydah, raised in Saudi Arabia to Palestinian parents, who was the first victim of the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, but who has never been charged because the US has completely walked back on its initial claims that he was the “No. 3 in Al-Qaeda.”

A harrowing book and documentary have been written and made about Abu Zubaydah’s case, and in 2023 the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued a devastating opinion condemning his imprisonment as arbitrary, and calling for his release, which was also the source, as I noted above, for the “grave concern” expressed that the very basis of the detention system at Guantanamo — involving “widespread or systematic imprisonment or other severe deprivation of liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law” — “may constitute crimes against humanity.”

In June 2024, at his latest administrative review hearing, his lawyers raised the tantalizing prospect that negotiations were underway for his release to an unidentified country, which would “monitor his activities indefinitely”, but nothing more has since been heard about this proposal.

As for the other nine men, all are, at the very least, part of a system that is legal rather than “administrative”, although that system, the military commissions, has been fraught with problems since it was first dreamt up in November 2001 by then-vice president Dick Cheney as a way of using supposed evidence derived from torture to swiftly try and execute kidnapped and violated “detainees” accused of terrorism.

Cancelled and revived twice — in 2006, after Cheney’s hubris met with appropriate resistance from the Supreme Court, and in 2009, under President Obama — the commissions have, nevertheless, struggled to overcome the shadow of torture that has always hung over them, and which is, as should always have been obvious, incompatible with the pursuit of justice.

To some extent or another, all of the nine men in the military commission system are trapped in the morally and legally fraught territory where torture meets, and ultimately corrodes justice. Only one of the nine, Ali Hamza Al-Bahlul, has been convicted, but he, cruelly but unintentionally, is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement. Another, Abd Al-Hadi Al-Iraqi, Guantánamo’s most physically disabled prisoner, agreed to a plea deal but is now having to fight in court to prevent his repatriation to Iraq, where the US authorities cannot guarantee that he would either be safe, or that his degenerative and incurable spinal disease — which has worsened at Guantánamo because of the lack of adequate medical treatment available at the prison — would be properly treated.

Of the other seven men, five are accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, but their prosecution has been mired in pre-trial hearings since 2012. One, Ramzi Bin Al-Shibh, has been hurled into a legal limbo after a DoD Sanity Board ruled that he was mentally unfit to stand trial, while three others, including the alleged mastermind, Khalid Shaykh Mohammad, are caught in unseemly wrangling between the commissions’ convening authority, who agreed plea deals last year that took the death penalty off the table in their case, and the outgoing defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, who has, so far unsuccessfully, tried to rescind those deals.

Meanwhile, the fifth man, Ammar Al-Baluchi, continues to challenge the basis of his imprisonment, while the two others, Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, also caught up in seemingly endless pre-trial hearings, and whose release was called for in 2023 by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, and Riduan Isamuddin (aka Hambali), continue to await trials whose viability still seems very much to be in doubt.

Celebrating the release of the eleven Yemenis

I’ll be writing more about all of the remaining prisoners at Guantánamo in the weeks and months to come, but, for now, I’d like to close by asking us all to spare a moment to think about the eleven men who have just had their freedom restored, and to reflect on the words of George M. Clarke, who represents two of them, Tawfiq Al-Bihani and Hassan Bin Attash.

Speaking to the New York Times, Clarke commended Oman for taking in these men, not just because, as he explained, Oman is “culturally compatible”, but also because, on the basis of a prior resettlement program under Obama, “they are given reasonably decent freedom, and they are properly integrated into society in a successful way. And that’s what makes resettlement work.”

Clarke added that the men they were “eager to rejoin a world of cellphones and internet access”, as Carol Rosenberg described it, and stated, “They want to live their lives. They want to get married. They want to have kids. They want to get a job and have normal lives.”

While a shadow still hangs over these men, because those resettled under Obama were suddenly and unexpectedly repatriated to Yemen this summer, perhaps to make way for the new arrivals, it seems unlikely that this shadow will cast too much shade right now on men who are tasting freedom for the first time since the early years of the 21st century, and I send them my very best wishes as they begin to rebuild their lives.

* * * * *

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009 (out of the 532 released by President Bush), the 196 prisoners released from February 2009 to January 2017 by President Obama, the one prisoner released by Donald Trump, and the 14 prisoners released by President Biden from July 2021 to December 2024, 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, and for the stories of the other 390 prisoners released by President Bush, see my archive of articles based on the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011: June 2007 – 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 – 16 Saudis; August 2007 – 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 – 16 Saudis; 1 Mauritanian; 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 – 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; 14 Saudis; December 2007 – 2 Sudanese; 13 Afghans (here and here); 3 British residents; 10 Saudis; May 2008 – 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 – 2 Algerians; 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 – 2 Algerians; September 2008 – 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 – 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; 2 Algerians; 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; 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); 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); 1 Algerian; 1 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; April 2012 — 2 Uighurs to El Salvador; July 2012 — 1 Sudanese; September 2012 — 1 Canadian (Omar Khadr) to ongoing imprisonment in Canada; August 2013 — 2 Algerians; December 2013 — 2 Algerians; 2 Saudis; 2 Sudanese; 3 Uighurs to Slovakia; March 2014 — 1 Algerian (Ahmed Belbacha); May 2014 — 5 Afghans to Qatar (in a prisoner swap for US PoW Bowe Bergdahl); November 2014 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fawzi al-Odah); 3 Yemenis to Georgia, 1 Yemeni and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia, and 1 Saudi; December 2014 — 4 Syrians, 1 Palestinian and 1 Tunisian to Uruguay; 4 Afghans; 2 Tunisians and 3 Yemenis to Kazakhstan; January 2015 — 4 Yemenis to Oman, 1 Yemeni to Estonia; June 2015 — 6 Yemenis to Oman; September 2015 — 1 Moroccan and 1 Saudi; October 2015 — 1 Mauritanian and 1 British resident (Shaker Aamer); November 2015 — 5 Yemenis to the United Arab Emirates; January 2016 — 2 Yemenis to Ghana; 1 Kuwaiti (Fayiz al-Kandari) and 1 Saudi; 10 Yemenis to Oman; 1 Egyptian to Bosnia and 1 Yemeni to Montenegro; April 2016 — 2 Libyans to Senegal; 9 Yemenis to Saudi Arabia; June 2016 — 1 Yemeni to Montenegro; July 2016 — 1 Tajik and 1 Yemeni to Serbia, 1 Yemeni to Italy; August 2016 — 12 Yemenis and 3 Afghans to the United Arab Emirates (see here and here); October 2016 — 1 Mauritanian (Mohammedou Ould Slahi); December 2016 — 1 Yemeni to Cape Verde; January 2017 — 4 Yemenis to Saudi Arabia; 8 Yemenis and 2 Afghans to Oman; 1 Russian, 1 Afghan and 1 Yemeni to the United Arab Emirates, and 1 Saudi repatriated to Saudi Arabia for continued detention; May 2018 — 1 Saudi to continued imprisonment in Saudi Arabia; July 2021 — 1 Moroccan; March 2022 — 1 Saudi (Mohammed al-Qahtani); April 2022 — 1 Algerian; June 2022 — 1 Afghan; October 2022 — 1 Pakistani (Saifullah Paracha); February 2023 — 1 Pakistani to Belize (Majid Khan); 2 Pakistanis; March 2023 — 1 Saudi; April 2023 — 1 Algerian; December 2024 — 1 Kenyan; 2 Malaysians; 1 Tunisian.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), 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 (see the ongoing 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 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 you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the 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, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his 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.