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Wonderful news from Guantánamo, as Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu, the prison’s sole Kenyan prisoner, and one of 16 men who had long been approved for release, has been repatriated and reunited with his family, leaving 29 men in total still held at the prison.

The release confirms that, behind the scenes, the Biden administration has taken seriously the scandal of holding 16 men unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes — decisions that were taken between two and four years ago, and in three outlying cases, nearly 15 years ago.

Bajabu, with two other men, was approved for release by a Periodic Review Board, a parole-type process established by President Obama in 2013, almost three years ago, on December 27, 2021, but had not been freed in part because the review process is purely administrative, meaning that no legal mechanism exists to compel the government to free any of these men if they cannot be bothered or find it politically inconvenient.

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Last week (on May 10), the sole Kenyan held at Guantánamo, Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu (aka Mohammed Abdulmalik) became the 36th prisoner to have his case considered by a Periodic Review Board. A high-level review process that began in November 2013, the PRBs involve representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and, in the two and half years since they were set up, they have been reviewing the cases of two groups of men: 41 men described by the Guantánamo Review Task Force (which President Obama set up when he first took office in 2009) as “too dangerous to release,” and 23 others initially put forward for trials until the basis for prosecutions largely collapsed, in 2012 and 2013, after appeals court judges ruled that the war crimes being prosecuted had been invented by Congress.

For the 41 men described as “too dangerous to release,” the task force also acknowledged that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial, but what this means, of course, is that it is not evidence at all, but something far less trustworthy — information that was extracted from the prisoners themselves through the use of torture or other forms of abuse, or through being bribed with the promise of better living conditions.

Of the 36 cases reviewed up to and including Mohammed Abdulmalik, 21 men have so far been approved for release, and just seven have had their ongoing imprisonment recommended, a success rate of 75%, which rather demolishes the US claims about the men question being “too dangerous to release.” The eight others reviewed are awaiting decisions. Read the rest of this entry »