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guantánamo bay
'Finally!' 11 Men Transferred to Oman From Guantánamo, But 15 Remain
The president faces calls to "end the abhorrent U.S. practice of indefinite detention without charge or trial at Guantánamo by transferring the remaining detainees who have never been charged with crimes."
Jan 06, 2025
Human rights advocates on Monday praised the Biden administration's transfer of 11 Yemeni men from the United States' Guantánamo Bay military prison in Cuba to Oman for resettlement—which left just 15 detainees at the facility that opened nearly 23 years ago, during the early days of the so-called War on Terror, and is notorious for torture.
"We welcome the transfer of these 11 men to Oman by the Biden administration, as it was long overdue," said Daphne Eviatar, director of the Security With Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA, in a statement. "The U.S. government now has an obligation to ensure that the government of Oman will respect and protect their human rights."
Since taking office in 2021, President Joe Biden has failed to deliver on his promise to shutter the prison—like former President Barack Obama, who had Biden as his vice president. Between the Democrats, Republican former President Donald Trump, who wants to keep the facility open, served a term; he is set to return to the White House in two weeks.
Eviatar said that "we commend President Biden for taking this step before he leaves office and urge him to finally end the abhorrent U.S. practice of indefinite detention without charge or trial at Guantánamo by transferring the remaining detainees who have never been charged with crimes. This would be a tremendous achievement of his presidency."
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR)—which represents 51-year-old Sharqawi Al Hajj, one of the men flown to Oman—also welcomed the progress on Monday but called on the president to go even further while he remains in power.
"It is remarkable that the prison population at Guantánamo is down to 15 people," said CCR senior staff attorney Pardiss Kebriaei. "We urge the administration to press forward in transferring the remaining uncharged men, including Center for Constitutional Rights client Guleed Hassan Duran, allow resolution of the remaining charged cases through mutually acceptable pleas, and stand down in opposing habeas cases for anyone who is uncharged but will be left at Guantánamo."
Kebriaei represents Al Hajj, who "endured physical and psychological coercion" at Central Intelligence Agency sites before arriving at Guantánamo, where "he waged prolonged hunger strikes to protest his indefinite detention," and "attempted to hurt himself multiple times in moments of desperation," according to CCR. He was never charged with a crime.
"Our thoughts are with Mr. Al Hajj as he transitions to the free world after almost 23 years in captivity. His release is hopeful for him and for us," said Kebriaei. "We are grateful to Oman and to the individuals in the administration who made this transfer happen, and to the many people over the years whose work and advocacy paved the way for this moment."
The Pentagon said that the other 10 men are: Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman, Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi, Khalid Ahmed Qassim, Suhayl Abdul Anam al Sharabi, Hani Saleh Rashid Abdullah, Tawfiq Nasir Awad Al-Bihani, Omar Mohammed Ali al-Rammah, Sanad Ali Yislam Al Kazimi, Hassan Muhammad Ali Bib Attash, and Abd Al-Salam Al-Hilah.
The Pentagon also noted in its Monday statement that of the 15 remaining detainees, "three are eligible for transfer; three are eligible for a periodic review board; seven are involved in the military commissions process; and two detainees have been convicted and sentenced by military commissions."
As NPRreported:
Monday's transfers were originally scheduled to happen in October 2023, but were halted at the last minute due to concerns in Congress about instability in the Middle East following the Hamas attack on Israel.
That the plan was resurrected during President Biden's final two weeks in office signals a last-ditch effort by his administration to shrink Guantánamo's prisoner population and get closer to his goal of trying to close the facility. In recent weeks, the U.S. has transferred four other Guantánamo inmates—a Kenyan, a Tunisian, and two Malaysians—and is preparing for the transfer of at least one more, an Iraqi.
The repatriation of the Tunisian man, 59-year-old Ridah bin Saleh al-Yazidi, last week came on the same day that a Pentagon appeals panel upheld plea deals for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who were imprisoned at Guantánamo after allegedly plotting the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and agreed to spend the rest of their lives in prison to avoid execution.
Despite the Biden administration's progress, global vigils planned for Saturday "will, of course, be proceeding as planned, because 15 men are still held," according to journalist and Close Guantánamo co-founder Andy Worthington.
"This coming week—which includes the 23rd anniversary of the prison's opening, on Saturday, January 11—is a crucial time for highlighting the need for urgent action from the Biden administration," Worthington said, "in the last few weeks before Donald Trump once more occupies the White House, bringing with him, no doubt, a profound antipathy towards any of the men still held, and a hunger for sealing the prison shut as he did during his first term in office."
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Pentagon Repatriates Guantánamo Detainee Held Without Charge for Over Two Decades
The move came as the Biden administration faced pressure to clear the notorious military prison of all uncharged detainees before Donald Trump takes office.
Dec 31, 2024
The Biden administration announced late Monday that it transferred a Tunisian man who was never charged with a crime out of the notorious Guantánamo Bay military prison in Cuba, a move that came more than a decade after the detainee was approved for release.
The man, 59-year-old Ridah bin Saleh al-Yazidi, had been held at Guantánamo since the day former U.S. President George W. Bush opened the prison camp in 2002. The Pentagon said in a statement Monday that al-Yazidi has been repatriated to the government of Tunisia.
With al-Yazidi's transfer, there are now 26 detainees remaining at Guantánamo, the majority of whom have never been charged with a crime and have been approved for release from the prison, which United Nations experts have said is "defined by the systematic use of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment." More detainees have died at Guantánamo than have been convicted of a crime, according to the human rights group Reprieve.
The Biden administration said in 2021 that it intended to shutter the prison, and critics have accused the administration of "a lack of courage" as it has dragged its feet on the matter.
But human rights campaigners have welcomed recent progress. Al-Yazidi was the fourth Guantánamo detainee in two weeks to be transferred from the prison by the Biden administration, which has faced growing pressure to clear the camp of the remaining uncharged men before U.S. President-elect Donald Trump takes power next month.
"Fifteen men remain who have never been charged with any crimes and have long been cleared by U.S. security agencies to leave Guantánamo, some for more than a decade," Daphne Eviatar, director of the Security With Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA, said in a statement earlier this month after the Biden administration announced the transfer of three never-charged men out of the prison camp.
"President Biden must transfer these men before he leaves office, or he will continue to bear responsibility for the abhorrent practice of indefinite detention without charge or trial by the U.S. government," said Eviatar. "It has been 23 years; President Biden can, and must, put an end to this now."
The transfer was announced on the same day that a Pentagon appeals panel "upheld a military judge's finding that the plea deals in the September 11 case are valid, clearing the way at least for now for a guilty plea hearing next week with the accused mastermind of the attack, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed," The New York Timesreported Monday. Mohammed is among the Guantánamo detainees who have been charged with a crime by a military commission.
"Col. Matthew N. McCall, the judge in the case, had ruled that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III acted too late and beyond the scope of his authority when he rescinded the three deals on August 2, two days after a senior Pentagon appointee had signed them," the Times reported. "Under the pretrial agreements, or PTAs, Mr. Mohammed and two co-defendants agreed to plead guilty to war crimes charges in exchange for life prison sentences rather than face a death-penalty trial."
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The Seeds of Trump’s Lawlessness Were Sown by the War on Terror
Much (though admittedly, not all) of what we’re witnessing today might simply be considered an escalation of the dire turn that this country took after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Dec 22, 2024
Post-election America finds itself in a panic. Voices from across a wide political spectrum warn that the country stands on the precipice of a potentially unprecedented and chaotic disregard for the laws, norms, and policies upon which its stability and security have traditionally relied. Some fear that the “new” president, Donald Trump, is likely to declare a national emergency and invoke the Insurrection Act, unleashing the U.S. military for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and for “retribution against” the “enemy from within” as well as “radical left lunatics.” As the New Republic‘s editor Michael Tomasky notes, writing about the nomination of Kash Patel for the post of director of the FBI, “We’re entering a world where the rule of law is turned inside out.”
The blame game for such doomsday fears ranges far and wide. Many pinpoint the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to grant immunity to presidents for their core official acts, essentially removing any restraints on Trump’s agenda of retribution and revenge. Some, like Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal, see loopholes in the law as the basis for their concern about the future and are urging Congress to pass legislation that will place additional constraints on the deployment of the military on American soil. Others argue that the Constitution itself is the problem. In his new book, No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States, Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky even suggests that it may be time for a new constitution.
If only, as a nation, we could look beyond the tumultuous context of the current moment and imagine how to make our way to a safer, more sustainable future.
But those involved in the fear and blame game might do well to take a step back and reflect for a moment on how we got here. Today’s crisis has been evolving for so many years now. In fact, much (though admittedly, not all) of what we’re witnessing today might simply be considered an escalation of the dire turn that this country took after the attacks of September 11, 2001, nearly a quarter of a century ago.
“Quaint” and “Obsolete”
It was January 2002 when White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales used the two words “quaint and obsolete,” whose echoes remain eerily with us to this very day (and seemingly beyond). The occasion was a debate taking place at the highest levels of the administration of President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. By then, this country had invaded Afghanistan and authorized the opening of a new detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, ominously offshore of American justice, for captives of what already was being called the Global War on Terror. Two weeks after the first prisoners arrived at that prison camp on January 11, administration officials were already wondering which, if any, laws should apply when it came to the treatment of such prisoners.
Gonzales, who was to become the attorney general in Bush’s second term, laid out the options for the president. At issue was whether the Geneva Conventions—a set of treaties established in the wake of the atrocities of the Second World War—applied to the United States in its treatment of any prisoners from its war on terror.
In a memo to President Bush, Gonzales noted that Department of Justice lawyers had already concluded, when it came to al Qaeda and Taliban (Afghan insurgents in 2001, now in charge of the country) captives, the answer was no. Gonzales agreed, stating that “the war against terrorism is a new kind of war.” The laws of war, he told the president, were “obsolete” in the current context, and the laws and norms requiring humane treatment for enemy prisoners had been “render[ed] quaint,” given this new kind of war. Accordingly, the Bush administration took the position that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the prisoners they had already captured. As a result, in the years to come, the indefinite and arbitrary detention of about 780 men would be institutionalized and disregard for the law would become a regular, if secret, part of the war on terror—an approach that would lead to the practice of torture at what came to be known as CIA “black sites” globally.
Nor would that be the only situation in which old laws were deemed outdated on national security grounds.
The Wider Framework
At the heart of such a rejection of the law was the determination that the president had primary, if not ultimate, authority when it came to national security. As Princeton historian Julian Zelizer has put it, top Bush administration officials “claimed that executive power was essential to fighting the war.” Members of Congress generally agreed and facilitated the shift to ever more solitary executive power in the name of war, setting a template for yielding some of its constitutional and statutory powers in matters of war to the president. One week after 9/11, Congress passed an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that granted the president the power “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”
Subsequently, other laws were bent, bypassed, or even broken in the name of keeping the nation safe. Congress also further enhanced the powers of the executive by passing the USA Patriot Act which, among other things, weakened the Fourth Amendment’s protections against the surveillance of American citizens. Prior to 9/11, such protections had remained strong. After 9/11, as Brown’s Costs of War Project reports, “These mass surveillance programs allow[ed] the U.S. government to warrantlessly and ‘incidentally’ vacuum up Americans’ communications, metadata and content, and store their information in data centers and repositories,” sacrificing standing protections in the name of greater security.
Nor would that be the end of the matter. In the name of national security, the country’s law enforcement entities would also turn their backs on prohibitions against discrimination based on race, religion, or national origin as laid out, for example, in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As a Costs of War Project report summed it up, the “Special Registration” requirement “announced in 2002 required all males from a list of Arab and Muslim countries [to] report to the government to register and be fingerprinted.” According to the ACLU, that program (known as NSEERS) would end up affecting foreign nationals from 25 countries.
While the war on terror has receded into the background of our lives, its premises and tactics remain all too readily available.
Worse yet, such deviations from constitutional protections and the law did not come to an end with the Bush administration. Although President Barack Obama would issue an executive order restoring adherence to the laws banning torture and end the NSEERS program (which, the ACLU noted, “did not achieve a single terrorism-related conviction” despite “tens of thousands of people having been forced to register”), there were other key areas in which his administration did not reverse past policy—anything but, in fact. “Early in [President Obama’s] administration,” as historian Kathryn Olmstead notes, “the new president signaled his intention to continue Bush’s surveillance policies.” Though “surprised by the extent of the spying” in the domestic intelligence program, Obama’s team nonetheless “quickly agreed to continue Bush’s mass surveillance program.”
In addition, by escalating a global drone program of “targeted killings,” the Obama administration would forge its own path toward weakening legal protections in the name of national security. During the Obama years, on what came to be known as “Terror Tuesdays,” national security officials presented the president with a list of names, all potential targets to be captured or killed. (It would come to be known in the media as “the kill list.”) As NPR summed it up, Obama, “wishing to be seen as a restraining influence,” would weigh in on the final list of names. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, “A total of 563 strikes, largely by drones, targeted Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen during Obama’s two terms, compared to 57 strikes under Bush.”
Leaving those programs on the table for the next president would be—and remains—a prescription for disaster.
Trump and the Tactics of the War on Terror
Trump’s first presidency combined the strategies of Bush and Obama when it came to the war on terror. Though it was little noted then, he launched an unprecedented number of drone strikes, tripling Obama’s numbers by 2022, including the targeted assassination of a high-ranking Iranian official, Revolutionary Guard leader Qassim Soleimani. Political scientist Micah Zenko noted that, despite his claims of being non-interventionist, Trump proved to be “more interventionist than Obama: in authorizing drone strikes and special operations raids in non-battlefield settings (namely, in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia).”
The 45th president’s disregard for legal restraints took other war-on-terror policies to a new level. Within a week of his inauguration, President Trump had issued an executive order that came to be known as “the Muslim Ban,” forbidding citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries entry to the United States. And like his predecessor, he showed little interest in sunsetting the expansive surveillance authority he had inherited.
In fact, Trump brought the tools and tactics designed for the war on terror to the “home front,” notably in his approach to dissent. He attacked Black Lives Matter protesters as enemies, labeling them “terrorists.” He made discrimination against foreigners a national policy at the onset of his first presidency, announcing his plans to detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants and promising to institute policies that intentionally separated migrant children from their families. He even threatened to widen the uses of Guantánamo: “…[W]e are keeping [Guantanamo] open… and we’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me, we’re gonna load it up.” Wondering who those “bad dudes” would be, NPRnoted that captives in the war on terror were mostly a thing of the past and reminded listeners of an interview in which Trump had said such suspects should be tried by military commissions, the fraught trial system already in place there.
When Joe Biden became president, he curtailed a number of the excesses of the war on terror from the Trump years, even issuing a proclamation revoking the Muslim ban. When it came to drone strikes, he lessened them substantially, leaving them “far from their peaks under the Obama and Trump administrations.” In addition, he put new limits on their use going forward. In a striking gesture, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines pledged to “promote transparency” in place of the excessive secrecy that had underpinned the torture program, surveillance abuses, and the targeted-killing program. Still, all too much remained ongoing or fully capable of being revived in the new Trump years.
Bringing It All Back Home
Which brings us to expectations—or fears—of what will happen in a second Trump presidency. When it comes to the use of force, detention, discrimination, and the erasure of constitutional protections, Trump has already promised to bring the broad counterterrorism authority of earlier in this century to bear on the home front.
Let’s begin with his promises to institute discriminatory policies based on race and national origin. As of today, the incoming administration has pledged to round up, put in camps, and oversee the mass detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants from Latin America in particular, potentially combining a detention nightmare (lacking due process and underpinned by massive discrimination) with suspicion often based on national origin rather than specific evidence of criminal behavior—an echo of the war on terror’s early years.
In place of national security, Trump has promised to substitute, in the words of the 2024 Republican platform, the “threat to our very way of life,” a term that expands the vagueness encapsulated in “terror” and “terrorism” to a new level. Notably, in the run-up to the 2024 election he had already made it crystal clear that the path from the war on terror abroad to his internal policy plans would be important to his administration. When candidate Trump promised to use the military to counter “the enemy from within,” a spokesperson clarified the meaning for the press. As The Washington Post reported at the time, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung acknowledged the way the candidate was linking his political enemies to terrorists. Trump, he explained, was “equat[ing] the prospect of unspecified efforts by the left during the elections with the recent arrest of an Afghan man in Oklahoma, who is accused of plotting an Election Day attack in the United States in the name of the Islamic State group.” Cheung then furthered the analogy by adding, “President Trump is 100% correct—those who seek to undermine democracy by sowing chaos in our elections are a direct threat, just like the terrorist from Afghanistan that was arrested for plotting multiple attacks on Election Day within the United States.”
Where Are We Today?
While the war on terror has receded into the background of our lives, its premises and tactics remain all too readily available. Its expansion of presidential powers, coupled with the Supreme Court’s recent immunity decision when it comes to more or less anything a president does in office, leaves the country in a state of imminent peril. Surveillance powers remain remarkably broad. Drone-strike authorities remain in place, even if, in the wake of the Biden years, curtailed for now. And the prospect of indefinite detention as a codified element of American policy remains possible not only at Guantanamo but for migrants across the United States. And to top it all off, Congress continues to be unwilling to restrict a president’s war powers in any significant way, having repeatedly refused to repeal or replace that original 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force in which neither time, nor geographical limits, nor even precise limits on the definition of the enemy exist.
If only, as a nation, we could look beyond the tumultuous context of the current moment and imagine how to make our way to a safer, more sustainable future. Sadly, despite the dangers that may lie ahead, it’s not just partisan politics, or economic disarray, or the fragile state of the world that has brought us to this point. It’s our own negligence in accepting the dismantling of the laws and norms that had guided us prior to 9/11 and refusing ever since to restore our once-upon-a-time respect for the rule of law and for one another.
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