Guantánamo’s Youngest Prisoner, Hassan Bin Attash, Approved for Release; 21 of the 37 Men Still Held Are Now Awaiting Their Freedom
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I’m pleased to report that, after nearly 18 years of imprisonment without charge or trial at Guantánamo, preceded by two years in proxy torture prisons and CIA “black sites,” Guantánamo’s youngest prisoner, Hassan bin Attash, a Yemeni brought up in Saudi Arabia, has been approved for release by a Periodic Review Board, a parole-type process established under President Obama, Just 16 or 17 years old when he was first seized, in a house raid in Pakistan on September 11, 2002, Hassan has, as a result, spent over half his life imprisoned without charge or trial.
Between 2014 and 2016, the PRBs reviewed the cases of 64 men at Guantánamo who were accurately described in the media as “forever prisoners.” 41 of them, including Hassan, had been designated as “too dangerous to release” by Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, which had reviewed the cases of the 240 men inherited from George W. Bush in 2009, with the task force members conceding, however, that they had insufficient evidence against them to put them on trial.
23 others had been recommended for trials by the task force — until a number of successful appeals in the military commissions (the trial system ill-advisedly invented for Guantánamo) made it clear that war crimes trials were inappropriate for low-level terrorist designations like “providing material support for terrorism,” which had been the rationale behind many of the prosecution recommendations.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
