After more than 15 years at Guantanamo, Ahmed al-Darbi was returned to Saudi Arabia in to continue serving a prison sentence for a bomb attack on an oil tanker off the coast of Yemen. On July 19, the Biden administration released its first detainee, Abdul Latif Nasser , a Moroccan, four years after he had been cleared for transfer in Held for 19 years, Nasser was never charged with any crime. The military commissions are tribunals organised outside the framework of US and international law by the US Department of Defense to bring charges against detainees at Guantanamo.
US constitutional protections of due process do not apply, allowing the government to maintain secret evidence derived from torture and to hold detainees indefinitely. Detainees are required to use the lawyers assigned to them. They are not allowed to see all the evidence against them. Only two-thirds of a jury is required to convict, and even in cases of acquittal, release is not guaranteed.
Many of the detainees at Guantanamo were first held in black sites by the CIA or elsewhere by the US military and were tortured before being transferred to Guantanamo. Those records are largely still secret and lawyers who represent detainees are required to enter non-disclosure agreements that prevent them from publicly describing the torture suffered by their clients. In June, a military judge for the first time publicly agreed to allow information obtained through torture to be used in a military case against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri , a Saudi accused of planning the bomb attack on the USS Cole in that killed 17 US Navy sailors.
The US government has acknowledged torture took place in a number of cases, among them that of Abu Zubaydah , a Palestinian man captured by the US in Pakistan and tortured for years in a series of secret CIA prisons, as detailed in a US Senate report.
Another is Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi whose military charges were dismissed because he had been tortured at Guantanamo but who remains imprisoned despite mental illness. Human rights advocates and lawyers for detainees say the Biden administration will be under increasing pressure to bring Guantanamo to a close. The White House announced in February that it is conducting an internal review of how to close Guantanamo.
Biden can ask Congress to repeal its prohibitions on Guantanamo detainees entering the US for purposes of serving prison terms.
Biden is considering naming a special envoy at the US Department of State for closing Guantanamo, a position created by Obama but eliminated during the Trump administration. The Pakistani prisoner has been held there since on suspected ties to al-Qaeda, although he has never been charged. Moroccan prisoner Abdul Latif Nasser had been held by the US since without being charged with a crime. By William Roberts. Published On 11 Sep Who has been released from Guantanamo?
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Water scarcity reaches crisis point in northern Syria. UN climate negotiations enter final day as differences remain. He was the first Asian journalist allowed to access the US facility, located outside the US borders, in Located on the coast of Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, kilometers miles off Miami, the "Gitmo" detention center in the middle of US naval base continues to generate controversy.
Nearly prisoners from 50 countries have passed through its gates since In the past 20 years, nine captives have also died in the prison. Also, 10 of them have been approved by US agencies for release but are still being held.
Among them is Saifullah Paracha, a year-old Pakistani — the oldest detainee at Guantanamo and who has never been charged with a crime.
Ten prisoners are facing military commission proceedings. One is nearing the end of a military sentence and is due to be released in February next year. Noting in files shows that the US army quickly concluded that the children were innocent. He said one of these children, Yasser, 16, had committed suicide. Quoting doctor at the Camp Delta, a temporary hospital inside Guantanamo, he said many detainees were suffering from acute depression, and many attempted suicide.
Obaidullah was 19 when he was arrested from his home in eastern Afghanistan in He completed 12 years in prison. They also found a borrowed van in the compound, with bloodstains on the back seat. Derek Poteet, a US Marine, who visited Afghanistan thrice to collect evidence, found something shocking.
Poteet said two days before the boy was arrested, he had borrowed the van to transport his pregnant wife to the hospital. She went into labor on the way and delivered a girl in the van. Hence, the bloodstains were on the seat. Nazakat said the US military officials acknowledged that some prisoners were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time.
In the fog of war, many innocents became suspects and terrorists. Some were arrested for wearing the Casio FW watch, which was seen as a sign of al-Qaeda.
The CIA officials concluded that bin Laden had trained recruits to use this watch as timers in bombs. At least 22 Uyghur detainees at Gitmo had also a similar story. They had fled their homes in Xinjiang province and crossed into Pakistan, where they were caught and sold for bounty. Nineteen of them have been freed and given asylum in various countries, including Albania and Sweden.
Gitmo was chosen by former US President George Bush because of its extra-judicial nature — as it is outside the US and its commonwealth, hence beyond the jurisdiction of any civilian court. He said the facility, a virtual fortress, ringed by barbed wire, watchtowers, and surveillance cameras, has several checkpoints, and even senior US officials require security clearance before arriving on the island. To get there, one must first clear security in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, before boarding an aircraft to the Leeward military airfield in Guantanamo Bay.
After clearing security, visitors are allowed to board a ferry to the Windward base across the bay, where they are allowed to enter the prison camps after a series of checks. In , Cuba leased this bay on its southeastern end to the US to be used as a naval coaling station.
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