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Last week, the Periodic Review Boards at Guantánamo made two decisions — to recommend one prisoner for release, and to recommend another for ongoing imprisonment. The decisions mean that, since the PRBs began in November 2013, 20 prisoners have now been approved for release, while five have had their ongoing imprisonment recommended, a success rate, for the prisoners, of 80%.
This is all the more remarkable — and all the more damaging for the government’s credibility — because the PRBs were established to review the cases of all the men not recommended for trials, and not already approved for release (by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established when he took office in 2009) — men who were described as “too dangerous to release”; a description that, it now transpires, was patently untrue, as myself and other commentators remarked at the time.
The task force itself acknowledged that it had insufficient evidence to put these men on trial, which alarmed those of us paying close attention, as it obviously meant that what purported to be evidence was not evidence at all, but a collection of dubious statements made by the prisoners themselves, or by their fellow prisoners, possibly involving the use of torture or other forms of abuse, or assessments that, because of their behavior, and threats they may have made while at Guantánamo, it was unsafe to release them. It should be noted that these assessments of the threat level may or may not have been true, because, of course, men treated as appallingly as the Guantánamo prisoners have been might not have posed a threat, but might only have been extremely indignant about the circumstances of their imprisonment.
When the PRBs began, 46 men were initially in the “too dangerous to release” category, and all but one of the men about whom decisions have been taken were in this category. 18 others had initially been recommended for prosecution, but had been made eligible for PRBs when a number of critical appeals court decisions largely discredited the military commission trial system used for the Guantánamo prisoners. The one man in this category approved for release, an Egyptian, was freed in January, but reviews have recently begun for others, and others are scheduled for the coming months.
The man approved for release on March 23 was Ayub Murshid Ali Salih (ISN 836, Yemen), also identified as Ayoub Saleh or Ayyub Salih, whose review took place in February, as I wrote about here. He was seized in Karachi, Pakistan in September 2002, on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and on the same day as Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the men allegedly responsible for the attacks, but while he and five others were initially described as “the Karachi Six” and sent for to CIA “black sites” for torture, “based on concerns that they were part of an al Qa’ida operational cell intended to support a future attack,” as the military described it, by the time of his PRB it was acknowledged that “this label more accurately reflects the common circumstances of their arrest and … it is more likely the six Yemenis were elements of a large pool of Yemeni fighters that senior al-Qa’ida planners considered potentially available to support future operations.”
In its final determination, the board, after specifically noting that its members had, “by consensus, determined that continued law of war detention of the detainee is no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” stated:
In making this determination, the Board noted that the detainee’s degree of involvement and significance in extremist activities has been reassessed to be that of a low-level fighter, and the detainee’s relative candor in discussing his time in Afghanistan. Further, the Board considered the detainee’s acceptance of the mistakes he has made and credible desire not to repeat those mistakes, his acknowledgement that he has benefitted from his time in detention and has taken advantage of educational opportunities while at Guantánamo, and his lack of ongoing extremist ties.
The decision is not only good news for Ayyub Salih, but also suggests that the other five men captured at the same time as him might also secure their release. Two of these men currently have PRBs scheduled — Said Salih Said Nashir (ISN 841), whose PRB is on April 21, 2016, and Shawqi Awad Balzuhair (ISN 838), whose PRB is on May 19, 2016 — while the other three — Bashir Nasir Ali al-Marwalah (ISN 837), Musab Omar Ali al-Mudwani aka Musa’ab al-Madhwani (ISN 839) and Hail Aziz Ahmed al-Maythali (ISN 840) — await dates for theirs. Of the five, only al-Madhwani has had his case previously examined publicly, when, in 2010, a judge ruling on his habeas corpus petition reluctantly turned it down, noting, however, that he did not think Madhwani was dangerous, and adding, “There is nothing in the record now that he poses any greater threat than those detainees who have already been released.”
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On the same day that Ayyub Salih was recommended for release, Mohammed al-Ansi (ISN 29, Yemen), also identified as Muhammad al-Ansi, was recommended for ongoing imprisonment, even though, as I noted at the time of his PRB in February, his lawyer, Lisa Strauss, had made a convincing case for his release, when, as I put it, “she explained how he has become a prolific artist, how he is ‘at peace with his fellow detainees and the guards as reflected in the minimal disciplinary infractions,’ and how he loves American culture.”
Nevertheless, the board members obviously had doubts based on al-Ansi’s own contributions, which were not made public at the time of his PRB. In its final determination, after stating that its members had, “by consensus, determined that continued law of war detention of the detainee remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” the board explained that they had “considered the significant derogatory information regarding the detainee’s past activities in Afghanistan,” and had, in particular, “noted [his] lack of candor resulting in an inability to assess [his] credibility and therefore his future intentions.”
Bearing in mind that al-Ansi will have a further administrative review in six month’s time, the board then encouraged him “to continue to be compliant, continue taking advantage of educational opportunities and continue working with the doctors to maintain his health,” as well as also encouraging him “to be increasingly forthcoming in communications with the Board.”
Note: The next PRB, for Obaidullah (ISN 762, Afghanistan), whose innocence, I think, was convincingly demonstrated by his legal team many years ago, is on April 19. As noted above, Said Salih Said Nashir’s PRB is two days after, and the PRB for Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman (ISN 027, Yemen), whose habeas corpus petition was granted in 2010, in a decision that was then reversed by the Washington, D.C. appeals court in 2011, is on April 26.
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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).
To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.
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