U.S. sends 3 more detainees to Saudi Arabia
By CAROL ROSENBERG
crosenberg@MiamiHerald.com
WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon sent three Guantánamo detainees to Saudi Arabia on Friday -- among them the prison camps' longest-running hunger striker -- to cap a week of far-flung transfers that the Obama administration said signaled global cooperation in its effort to empty the detention centern southeast Cuba.
''With these latest transfers, the U.S. government has moved nine detainees over the course of this week to locations in Bermuda, Chad, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia,'' said Justice Department attorney Matthew Olsen in a statement late Friday.
In fact, the tally was 10 detainees sent from the remote prison camps. The week opened with the first-ever transfer of a war-on-terror captive from Guantánamo to U.S. soil for trial.
Federal marshals moved Tanzanian Ahmed Ghailani, about 35, from Guantánamo's prison camp for former CIA captives to New York City for federal court arraignment. He is accused of conspiring in al Qaeda's twin suicide bombings of two East African U.S. embassies in 1998, and could be sentenced to death, if convicted at a civilian criminal trial.
Friday, the Justice Department said, Khalid Saad Mohammed, 35, Abdalaziz al Noofayaee, 33, and Ahmed Zuhair, 36, were all repatriated to the Saudi Kingdom. An Obama administration task force approved them for release, it said after years held at Guantánamo under suspicions of terror ties.
Zuhair's lawyers at a Yale Law School clinic identified their client as Guantánamo's longest running hunger striker. He stopped eating voluntarily in June 2005, said Yale law professor Ramzi Kassem, whose students had assembled Zuhair's habeas corpus petition alleging unlawful detention.
Prison camp staff subjected Zuhair to the detention center's tube-feeding regime, periodically strapping him into a chair across 1,450 days and pumping a nutritional shake through a tube tethered up his nose and into his stomach. Judge Emmett Sullivan had set a June 30 hearing for Justice Department lawyers to defend his Guantanamo detention.
“Mr. Zuhair is elated to be back in his homeland,” said Kassem. "He will nevertheless continue to seek a judicial determination by the U.S. courts that he is entirely innocent and that his detention has been unlawful and unjustified from the very beginning.”
A day earlier, U.S. defense lawyers disclosed that that Bermuda had agreed to resettle four Muslims from China, Uighurs, as guest laborers.
The men had been cleared of suspicion by both Bush and Obama administration review teams, and ordered free by a federal court. But until this week no nation had agreed to take them. Another 13 Uighurs, from a Muslim minority seeking their independence in China, are still at Guantánamo, awaiting resettlement. The Pacific island of Palau has agreed to take the remaining 13. It was unclear when they will be transferred.
Also Thursday, the U.S. Justice Department disclosed that it had sent Mohammed Gharani, in his young 20s, to his Chad and Jawad Jabbar Sadkhan al Sahlan, 41, home to Iraq.
Both men had been ordered set free after their volunteer American attorneys successfully challenging their detentions at U.S. District Court here.
Gharani's lawyers claimed that he was Guantánamo's youngest detainee -- and had been captured in Afghanistan at age 14. Defense Department spokesman argued that bone scans conducted on the young man at Guantánamo revealed he was a few years older.
The latest transfers decreased the detainee population to about 230. President Barack Obama has ordered the detention center emptied by Jan. 22, to fulfill a campaign promise that he would close the prison camps and boost U.S. standing on the international stage.
Olsen, who runs a detainee review task force at the Justice Department, credited the week's worth of transfers to ``the willingness of foreign governments to work closely with the United States on this important issue and to assist in the closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention facility.''
Join the discussion
The Miami Herald is pleased to provide this opportunity to share information, experiences and observations about what's in the news. Some of the comments may be reprinted elsewhere in the site or in the newspaper. We encourage lively, open debate on the issues of the day, and ask that you refrain from profanity, hate speech, personal comments and remarks that are off point. In order to post comments, you must be a registered user of MiamiHerald.com. Your username will show along with the comments you post. Thank you for taking the time to offer your thoughts.





















My Yahoo
@Nyx.replyAnswerText@