He also appears to be a cooperative captive. The public portion of his Pentagon files show the 5-foot-6-inch did not take part in hunger strikes that swept through the prison camps in the first few years, and that he consistently went before panels of senior officers to challenge the allegations against him.

DENIES TERROR CLAIMS

Until the Obama administration dropped its effort to detain him, the military alternately claimed he was in league with al Qaeda, the Taliban and a Tajik terror movement. He claimed that he was just a refugee who worked in construction.

In November, O'Hara said, he underwent an emergency appendectomy at the prison camps hospital and is now held at the communal Camp 4 medium-security site for cooperative captives.

U.S. policy has responded in different ways to various detainees' claims of persecution if repatriated. Under Secretary of State Colin Powell, for example, the State Department decided that cleared captives from China's Uighur minority could not be safely returned to their communist homeland and sought third-country resettlement.

But the U.S. government does not see Tajikistan as necessarily oppressing devout Muslims.

A State Department advisory says while the nation of 7.3 million is ''the poorest of the former Soviet republics in Central Asia'' it is ``a nominally constitutional, democratic, and secular republic, dominated by President Emomali Rahmon who has been in power since 1992.''

It also notes that ''corruption is pervasive, and numerous observers have noted that power has been consolidated into the hands of a relatively small number of individuals'' in the nation where ''rampant illicit trafficking of Afghan opium'' endangers social stability.

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