Two Sudanese Prisoners Released from Guantánamo, 79 Cleared Prisoners Remain

As the 12th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay approaches (on January 11, 2014), the run of good news regarding the situation at the prison continues, with the news that two prisoners — Ibrahim Idris, 52, and Noor Uthman Muhammed, 51, have been released to Sudan, and the Senate has voted to ease restrictions imposed by Congress over the last three years. The release of the two men brings the number of prisoners released this year to eight, and the total number of prisoners still held to 158.

Until recently, there had been three years of inaction regarding Guantánamo, when just five prisoners were released by President Obama. This inaction had been caused because of opposition in Congress and the president’s refusal to spend political capital overcoming that opposition. Of the five men released, two — Ibrahim al-Qosi and Omar Khadr — were amongst the handful of prisoners regarded as so significant that they had been put forward for military commission trials, and had agreed to plea deals that stipulated how much longer they should be held, and three — an Algerian and two Uighurs, Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province — had their release ordered by a US judge, after they had their habeas corpus petitions granted (before the appeals court in Washington D.C. rewrote the habeas rules, so that no prisoner could be released through a legal challenge).

The three years of inaction came to an end in August, when two Algerian men — Nabil Hadjarab and Mutia Sayyab — were released, who, like over half the men still held, had been cleared for release by a high-level, inter-agency task force that President Obama appointed shortly after taking office in 2009. Their release followed a promise to resume releasing prisoners that President Obama made in a major speech on national security issues in May.

That speech — and the appointment of envoys in the Pentagon and the State Department to help with the release of prisoners and the eventual closure of the prison — was prompted by a prison-wide hunger strike, undertaken by the majority of the men still held at Guantánamo, who had lost hope of ever being released, or of being given anything resembling justice, and with good reason.

The release of those two Algerians was followed at the start of December with the repatriation of Djamel Ameziane and Belkacem Bensayah, two more Algerians who had long been cleared for release, although, sadly, both of these men feared being sent home, and, last week, by the return to Saudi Arabia of two more cleared prisoners, Saad al-Qahtani and Hamoud al-Wady, the latter of whom had long been regarded as a Yemeni.

The releases of the two men to Sudan are to be commended, although the circumstances were rather different to the six men released in the last four months.

The first, Ibrahim Idris, had, like these six, been cleared for release by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, but, as Carol Rosenberg explained in the Miami Herald, “Congress has blocked transfers from Guantánamo to nations designated by the United States as a ‘state sponsor of terror’ [and] Sudan is on the list.”

What particularly spurred Idris’s release was a decision by the Justice Department not to contest his habeas corpus petition, the first time that the Justice Department has done so, which was followed by a judge ordering him to be freed. As I explained in an article in July, “The Schizophrenic in Guantánamo Whose Lawyers Are Seeking to Have Him Sent Home,” this was because Idris, as the Miami Herald described him, is “an obese, diabetic, schizophrenic Sudanese man who has mostly lived at Guantánamo’s psychiatric ward since he got to the US terror prison in Cuba on the day it opened.”

In her habeas submission to Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the District Court in Washington D.C., Idris’s lawyer, Jennifer Cowan, described Idris’s predicament, and why he should be freed, as follows:

Petitioner’s long-­term severe mental illness and physical illnesses make it virtually impossible for him to engage in hostilities were he to be released, and both domestic law and international law of war explicitly state that if a detainee is so ill that he cannot return to the battlefield, he should be repatriated. When interpreted in accordance with domestic law and the principles of international law, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (“AUMF” [the law passed by Congress after 9/11, which authorizes the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo]) does not permit the continued detention of Mr. Idris.

The other man, Noor Uthman Muhammed, was not cleared for release, but is another of the seven prisoners who have been subjected to military commission trials and have either been sentenced after trials (in two cases) or have agreed to plea deals (in the five others). Like David Hicks and Salim Hamdan (released under George W. Bush), and Ibrahim al-Qosi and Omar Khadr (previously released under President Obama), Muhammed agreed to a plea deal when his case came to trial in February 2011.

A sometime trainer at a military training camp in Afghanistan — one that, it should noted, was not aligned with Al-Qaeda — Muhammed agreed to a plea deal that  gave him 34 months of additional imprisonment prior to his release, a 34-month period that came to an end this month.

As I explained at the time of his plea deal, I believed that one reason the authorities wished to avoid a trial was because the camp Muhammed attended, Khalden, was run by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who, under torture in Egypt (where he had been rendered by the CIA after his capture in Afghanistan), made lies about connections between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda, which were used to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq, and who died in a Libyan prison in 2009 after being returned to Col. Gaddafi. Another reason for the plea deal, I thought, was because the camp’s gatekeeper was Abu Zubaydah, still held at Guantánamo, an alleged “high-value detainee,” for whom Bush’s torture program was first approved. Initially touted as Al-Qaeda’s number 3 and subjected to waterboarding (an ancient form of torture, involving controlled drowning) on 83 occasions after his capture in 2002, Zubaydah, it turns out, was never a member of Al-Qaeda at all.

For further information about Noor Uthman Muhammed, I recommend Tyler Cabot’s detailed article for Esquire from 2011, which I cross-posted with additional commentary here.

As with all the plea deals arranged at Guantánamo — and the two military commission convictions after trials — the US has always claimed that it could continue to hold prisoners as “enemy combatants” even after their sentences have come to an end, but this is, of course, an unacceptably outrageous proposal, and even under President Bush it was never attempted. More significantly for the Obama administration, however, it has been considered important to release prisoners on the date agreed to in their plea deals because the authorities have been trying hard to persuade other prisoners to agree to plea deals, generally in exchange for providing information about their fellow prisoners.

As the time approached for Noor Uthman Muhammed’s release, Charlie Savage reported for the New York Times about the delays in processing him for release, but by the start of December, as Reuters reported, it was clear that he would be repatriated.

On their return to Sudan, Idris said, at a press conference, “We have been subjected to meticulous, daily torture,” and added that the prisoners who embarked on a hunger strike were “double tortured … on an isolated island, surrounded by weapons.” He also said, “We were helpless.”

He also explained that Noor Uthman Muhammed was not able to be at the press conference because he had been taken to hospital to convalesce.

It is, of course, extremely important that the Obama administration sticks to the agreements it has made in plea deals at the military commissions, but it remains unavoidably true that another prisoner regarded as significant enough to be put forward for a trial (even though he was not any kind of major player) has been released while 79 prisoners who are so insignificant that they were cleared for release are still held.

Two-thirds of these men are Yemenis, and action needs to be taken in the new year to begin releasing these men. It is almost exactly four years since President Obama imposed a ban on releasing the Yemenis who had been just cleared for release by his own task force because of the uproar that followed a failed airline bomb plot on Christmas Day 2009 that had been hatched in Yemen.

In May, when President Obama promised to resume releasing prisoners, he also dropped his ban, but no Yemenis have yet been freed. It is now time that President Obama begins to release some of these men, who, for the last four years, have been held on the basis of “guilt by nationality.” No more excuses are acceptable.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for 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).

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 four-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas 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.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 77 prisoners released from February 2009 to December 16, 2013, 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: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 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; October 2009 — 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); December 2009 — 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); July 2010 — 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, December 2013 — 2 Saudis.