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As US Clears 3 Detainees for Release, Amnesty Demands Biden Close Gitmo
"President Biden cannot have true credibility advocating for other countries to respect human rights if he does not prioritize closing Guantánamo."
May 18, 2021
Blasting the continued imprisonment of detainees cleared for release at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base as "outrageous and shameful," Amnesty International on Tuesday responded to news that the Biden administration has approved three more Gitmo inmates for release by repeating its long-standing call for the facility's closure.
"Amnesty International USA is calling on President Biden immediately to appoint a high-level official in his administration to take charge of closing Guantanamo."
--Daphne Eviatar,
Amnesty International
The Biden administration announced Monday that three detainees--none of whom has ever been charged with any crime--have been cleared for release from Guantanamo to countries that will agree to impose security restrictions upon the men, the New York Timesreports.
One of men, Saifullah Paracha, is the oldest Gitmo prisoner. The 73-year-old Pakistani suffers from health problems including heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure. He has been imprisoned at Guantanamo without charge or trial for nearly 18 years.
Uthman Abdul al-Rahim Uthman, a 40-year-old Yemeni national who has been held without charge at Guantanamo since the prison opened in January 2002, was also cleared for release on Monday, as was Abdul Rabbani, a Pakistani.
Human rights defenders have long argued that piecemeal detainee releases only serve to prolong one of the darkest chapters in modern U.S. history.
Daphne Eviatar, director of the Security Within Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA, said in a statement responding to Monday's announcement that "it is not enough for the Biden administration to announce that more detainees are cleared for release when the government has not made any plans for how it will let cleared detainees finally experience freedom."
\u201cBREAKING: Closing of Guant\u00e1namo must be a priority for @POTUS \n\nResponding to the Biden administration approving three more detainees at Guant\u00e1namo Bay for release, @deviatar, the director of the Security With Human Rights program said:\nhttps://t.co/MqM5jfKYiJ\u201d— Amnesty International USA (@Amnesty International USA) 1621351513
"Nine people are currently cleared for release at Guantanamo and some have been cleared for more than a decade, yet they are still stuck," she said. "This is an outrageous and shameful violation of human rights. President [Joe] Biden cannot have true credibility advocating for other countries to respect human rights if he does not prioritize closing Guantanamo."
"Amnesty International USA is calling on President Biden immediately to appoint a high-level official in his administration to take charge of closing Guantanamo and arranging the transfers of all detainees who are not charged with crimes, a critical first step to ending the indefinite detention of the detainees there," Eviatar added.
While the three detainees' new clearance does not mean their freedom is imminent, Paracha's attorney told the Associated Press that "there are no impediments to his return" to Pakistan, and that she believes he will be released within the next few months.
"Nine people are currently cleared for release at Guantanamo and some have been cleared for more than a decade, yet they are still stuck. This is an outrageous and shameful violation of human rights."
--Eviatar
According to the Times, the last known transfer of a Guantanamo detainee to Pakistan occurred in 2008 during the George W. Bush administration. The Barack Obama administration halted all homebound transfers of Yemeni Gitmo prisoners in 2010 due to concerns they might join al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as Yemen slid toward civil war.
There have been great delays and difficulties in finding suitable countries to relocate former Guantanamo prisoners, some of whom have described life after release as a different kind of prison. Some former Gitmo detainees have been relocated far from their homelands in countries where they have sometimes struggled to adjust to unfamiliar ways of life.
A small handful, like Mohamedou Ould Slahi--a Mauritanian citizen whose torturous 14-year Gitmo ordeal is the subject of an award-winning 2021 feature film--have found fame, even as they face severe restrictions on their freedom.
Others have returned--or in the case of the many Guantanamo prisoners who were innocent, have taken--to the battlefield as they seek revenge on their former captors and tormentors.
In 2003, Paracha, a businessman and legal U.S. resident, was lured from his home in Karachi, Pakistan to Bangkok, Thailand as part of an FBI entrapment operation in which American agents posed as representatives of the retail chain Kmart seeking a merchandising deal.
Instead of finding a deal, Paracha found himself hooded and shackled as he was flown to the U.S. air base at Bagram, Afghanistan, where multiple detainees in the so-called War on Terror were tortured to death in late 2002. There, Paracha learned he was being accused of aiding al-Qaeda fighters. He was subsequently sent to Guantanamo Bay, which was also the site of widespread U.S. torture at the time.
Although Paracha admits to holding $500,000 for al-Qaeda operatives including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he maintains he was unaware of their identities or ties to terrorism and was just helping them as he would any Muslim.
During the tenure of Obama--who ultimately failed to execute his order to close Guantanamo--Paracha was deemed too innocent to charge, yet too dangerous to release. Such prisoners were subjected to a Periodic Review Board, which in April 2016 again denied Paracha's release.
Asked in February whether the Biden administration will move to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said "that certainly is our goal and our intention." Last month, two dozen members of the Senate Democratic Caucus demanded Gitmo's closure in a letter blasting the prison--where 40 men remain imprisoned--as "a symbol of lawlessness and human rights abuses."
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'A Blatant Violation': Sahrawis Dismiss Pompeo's Announcement of US Consulate in Moroccan-Occupied Western Sahara
The move comes two weeks after the U.S. became the first country to recognize Morocco's claim of sovereignty in the illegally occupied territory.
Dec 24, 2020
Sahrawi independence advocates defiantly dismissed an announcement Thursday by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the United States would open a "virtual" diplomatic mission in Western Sahara as a first step toward establishing a permanent consulate in the Moroccan-occupied territory.
"We the Saharawis are fighting [for] our complete sovereignty over our Western Sahara; we don't need your permission to do that."
--Minetu Larabas Sueidat,
National Union of Sahrawi Women
Pompeo said in a statement that the U.S. was "inaugurating a virtual presence post for Western Sahara, with a focus on promoting economic and social development, to be followed soon by a fully functioning consulate."
The State Department said that the virtual post--which will allow U.S. officials to conduct consular and other business remotely--will be managed by the American Embassy in Rabat, the Moroccan capital.
The development came nearly two weeks after President Donald Trump announced an agreement in which the U.S. recognized as legitimate Morocco's illegal occupation in exchange for the North African kingdom's establishing full diplomatic ties with Israel. This made the U.S. the first country to recognize Morocco's claim of sovereignty in Western Sahara.
While Morocco's monarch, King Mohammed VI, hailed U.S. recognition of his country's claim to Western Sahara as an "historic turning point," advocates for Sahrawi independence roundly condemned the move.
The Polisario Front--the United Nations-recognized, Algerian-backed Sahrawi national liberation movement--blasted the U.S. declaration as "a blatant violation of the United Nations charter and the resolutions of international legitimacy."
Additionally, Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (pdf) states that an "occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies," a proscription violated by both Israel in the occupied Palestinian and Syrian territories and by Morocco in Western Sahara.
There was widespread indignation following Pompeo's announcement, as Sahrawis and international human rights defenders condemned the move.
\u201c@SecPompeo When you go low we go up. Your empty slogans on human rights can never impact our future. We the Saharawis are fighting 4 our complete sovereignty over our #WesternSahara, we don\u2019t need your permission to do that\u201d— Secretary Pompeo (@Secretary Pompeo) 1608833786
\u201cHere's to hoping that Biden walks back this ill-considered disregard for international legality, and affirms US support for the human rights of all people in both #WesternSahara and #Morocco .\u201d— Eric Goldstein (@Eric Goldstein) 1608839452
\u201cWestern Sahara belongs to Morocco like Palestinian land belongs to Israel \u2014 IT DOESN\u2019T!!! \nJoin CODEPINK in rejecting occupation and colonialism from the U.S. to Palestine to Western Sahara. Add your name now! https://t.co/NgRkcCb59U\u201d— Ariel Gold \u05d0\u05e8\u05d9\u05d0\u05dc \u2721\ufe0f\u262e\ufe0f\ud83d\udd4a (@Ariel Gold \u05d0\u05e8\u05d9\u05d0\u05dc \u2721\ufe0f\u262e\ufe0f\ud83d\udd4a) 1608064270
Known as "Africa's last colony," Western Sahara was invaded by Moroccan and Mauritanian troops in 1975 as Spanish colonial troops withdrew from their former territory. In order to solidify Moroccan control over the phosphate- and fishery-rich land, former king Hassan II ordered a "Green March" of hundreds of thousands of Moroccan civilians into Western Sahara to colonize the vast desert territory.
Meanwhile, Moroccan forces committed horrific atrocities (pdf) while driving nearly half the Sahrawi population into neighboring Algeria.
Moroccan occupation forces built a 1,700-mile mostly sand wall to keep Algerian-backed Sahrawi militants out of Western Sahara, while denying Sahrawis inside their occupied homeland the U.N.-backed referendum they've been promised--and awaiting--for decades.
The Polisario Front has resisted the occupation for 45 years and today controls up to a quarter of Western Sahara as the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), which scores of United Nations member states have recognized since it was proclaimed in 1976. However, more than half of these countries have since either withdrawn or suspended their recognition.
Moroccan settlers today comprise over two-thirds of the territory's population of approximately 600,000.
A fragile U.N.-backed 1991 ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario rebels lasted until last month, when SADR President Brahim Ghali declared it over after he said that Moroccan troops opened fire on peaceful protesters.
Inside occupied Western Sahara, Moroccan forces brutally repress all forms of resistance, severely restricting free expression, movement, association, and press.
According to a 2015 Amnesty International report (pdf), as well as documentation by local and international human rights groups, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, forced disappearances, and torture are some of the tactics employed by the occupation forces to control the territory and its people.
Polisario forces are also accused of serious human rights violations, and some Sahrawis oppose their rule.
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