Biden Frees First Prisoner from Guantánamo: Abdul Latif Nasser, Approved for Release Five Years Ago

Abdul Latif Nasser, in a photo taken at Guantánamo in recent years.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.

 

In great news from Guantánamo, the Department of Defense announced today that Abdul Latif Nasser (aka Nasir), the last Moroccan national in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, has been repatriated. I’ve been writing about Nasser’s case since I first began researching and writing about Guantánamo over 15 years ago, and in recent years his story has frequently featured in the media, not least via a six-part Radiolab series last year.

Nasser, 56, was approved for release five years and eight days ago, after a Periodic Review Board, a review process set up under President Obama, established that, to use the PRB’s own studiously careful terminology, “law of war detention of Abdul Latif Nasir no longer remained necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the national security of the United States.” As a result, as the DoD’s news release explained, the board — which “consists of one senior career official from the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and State, along with the Joint Staff and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence” — authorized his “repatriation to his native country of Morocco, subject to security and humane treatment assurances.”

Nasser’s release from Guantánamo should have been straightforward, but the paperwork between the US and the Moroccan government wasn’t completed until 22 days before Obama left office, and, because legislation passed by Congress stipulated that lawmakers had to be informed 30 days before a prisoner release, he missed being freed by just eight days.

He then languished at the prison for another four years, under Donald Trump, when only one prisoner was released — a Saudi who had agreed a plea deal in his military commission trial, which stipulated that he had to be returned to continued imprisonment in his home country.

Tomorrow marks six months since Joe Biden’s inauguration, and while it is to his administration’s credit that Nasser has finally been freed, it should, in all honesty, have happened sooner.

I’m delighted that Nasser is finally going to be reunited with his family, and will hopefully be at liberty to resume life as a free man, although the Associated Press noted that, on his return, “the public prosecutor at the Court of Appeal in Rabat said the National Division of the Judicial Police in Casablanca had been instructed to open an investigation into Nasser ‘on suspicion of committing terrorist acts.’” As the AP noted, the announcement “didn’t specify” what those “terrorist acts” were supposed to have been, but Nasser’s Guantánamo file claimed that he had been “a member of a nonviolent but illegal Moroccan Sufi Islam group in the 1980s.”

Nasser’s attorney in Morocco, Khalil Idrissi, said that the “judicial authorities should not ‘take measures that prolong his torment and suffering, especially since he lived through the hell of Guantánamo.’” He added that he “hoped the investigation into Nasser would not ‘continue to deprive him of his freedom’ so he could finally ‘meet his family again,’” and also said that the years Nasser spent in Guantánamo “were unjustified and outside the law, and what he suffered remains a stain of disgrace on the forehead of the American system.”

As well as keeping an eye on Abdul Latif Nasser’s freedom, now that he has finally been released from Guantánamo, we should also not forget that ten other men still held at Guantánamo — out of the 39 men in total who are now still held — have also been approved for release: five in recent months, under President Biden, one at the end of Trump’s presidency, one in 2016, and three in 2010 under Obama’s first review process, the Guantánamo Review Task Force, two of whom, by all accounts, have refused all efforts to facilitate their release, a situation that must raise concerns about their state of mind.

Of the other 29 men still held, just 12 are facing trials, or have been through the trial process, leaving 17 others as “forever prisoners,” held indefinitely without charge or trial. As numerous critics of the prison’s continued existence have explained in recent months — most prominently, 24 Democratic Senators who wrote a letter to Biden in April — it is unacceptable that anyone held without charge or trial should continue to be held, and, as a result, the Biden administration also needs to authorize the release of these men — through PRBs, if, as seems sadly apparent, the Civil Division of the Justice Department is as intent on defending continued imprisonment without charge or trial at Guantánamo as it has been throughout the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

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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 (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 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

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 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, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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