Some GITMO Prisoners Fight Release

By William Fisher

As 13 prisoners held at the U.S. naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, appeared set to finally win their freedom, others are asking their release to be deferred.

The problem is that some of those cleared for release fear they will be tortured if they are transferred to other countries, in some cases their home countries.

Their lawyers have asked a federal court to delay their release from Guantanamo until their cases can be reviewed by the Supreme Court.

News of this latest twist in the long-running GITMO-release saga came as the government announced that 13 Uighurs – Turkic Muslims from China – have agreed to be transferred to Palau, a tiny island nation in the Pacific Ocean, some 500 miles (800 km) east of the Philippines.

For the 13, release will end years of imprisonment, abusive interrogations, and legal battles in both U.S. military and civilian courts.

The Uighurs cannot be repatriated to China because domestic American law proscribes deporting individuals to countries where they are likely to be abused.

The Bush administration conducted bilateral negotiations with a number of other countries to accept captives who had been cleared for release, but with limited success. These negotiations have continued under President Barack Obama.

The Uighurs were arrested in the “badlands” between Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2001, near where Osama bin Laden was believed to be hiding at the time, and had been trained to use automatic assault rifles.

The men were taken back to Afghanistan to a U.S. detention center in the city of Kandahar, interrogated for several months, and then flown to Guantanamo Bay.

Their cases were eventually heard by the U.S. military’s Combat Status Review Tribunals, which determined that they were not enemy combatants and posed no threat to the U.S.

Five of the Uighurs were released to Albania in 2006. One of the five subsequently was granted asylum in Sweden. In June of this year, the Obama administration negotiated the release of four additional Uighurs to Bermuda.

Meanwhile, in 2008, in a plea to a federal court for a writ of habeas corpus, lawyers for the remaining Uighurs challenged their continued detention. A federal judge ordered them released into the U.S., but that decision was reversed by an appeals court in February, 2009.

In April, lawyers for the Uighurs asked the Supreme Court to recognize that the right to habeas corpus requires a remedy when a court finds that an individual is wrongly detained. The petition asks for the Uighurs’ release.

"We now have asked the Supreme Court to hear the Uighur cases, and rule that the writ of habeas corpus guarantees to the innocent not just a judge's learned essay but something meaningful – their release," said Sabin Willett, of the Boston law firm of Bingham McCutchen, an attorney for the Uighurs.

In an effort to restore habeas petitions to their traditional status, a federal circuit court this week issued a one-line order in the Uighurs’ case (known as Kiyemba, et al., v. Obama, et al) giving the government sweeping authority — without “second-guessing” by the courts — to move detainees out of Guantanamo.

As a result, lawyers for the Uighurs are soon expected to file a second appeal to the Supreme Court. The key issue will be whether judges have any power to impose any controls on detainee transfers.

That is also a key issue for an Algerian national, Ahmed Belbacha, who has asked the Circuit Court to hold in abeyance his potential transfer to his home country, where he fears he will be tortured either by the government for past political activity, or by a terrorist organization he says has threatened him in the past.

His lawyer, Zachary Katznelson, senior counsel with Reprieve, the London-based legal charity, says his client describes his cell in Guantanamo as “like a grave.” He says, “Although it sounds crazy he would rather stay in those conditions than go back to Algeria.”

The 38-year-old Belbacha fled Algeria in 1999 at the height of the civil war between the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and the Algerian Government. He and his family received death threats from the GIA, which killed thousands during the 1990s.

Belbacha fled to France and then to Britain, where he applied for asylum. He was given exceptional leave to remain pending the outcome of his application.

He says that in July 2001 he traveled to Pakistan to undertake religious study. While there he crossed the border into Afghanistan and, when the US-led invasion began, crossed back into Pakistan. He claims that in December 2001 he was apprehended by villagers near Peshawar, in northwest Pakistan, and sold to the authorities for a bounty.

American agents first sent him to a prison camp near Kandahar and then, in March 2002,to Guantanamo, where a military tribunal alleged that he had associated with the Taleban in Afghanistan and ruled that his detention was justified. But in February of this year, the U.S. said he was fit for release.

His lawyers say they are prepared to go to the Supreme Court to prevent his transfer.

According to Shayana Kadidal, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a legal advocacy group that has mobilized legal defenses for dozens of Guantanamo detainees, “This issue has come up in the context of the 60-odd detainees who have no safe home country to be returned to. The government is resisting bringing them into the U.S. by arguing that the courts have no power to order a detainee released into the United States even if the government has no legal right to hold him and can’t find a safe country to take him.”

He told us, “Paradoxically, that argument – which the government is making so it can avoid taking even a single detainee into the U.S. -- is standing in the way of finding other countries to take the majority of the detainees, as foreign governments ask themselves why they should take in Guantanamo’s refugees when the U.S. will not contribute to the effort.”

Uighers’ attorney, Sabin Willett, says the courts are making “a hash” of the habeas corpus tradition. He told us, “The remedy for indefinite detention by the executive jailer turns out to be to direct the executive jailer to enter into diplomacy with third parties beyond the court's jurisdiction to try to free the prisoner on whatever terms it chooses.”

Major David Frakt, a law professor at Washington State University, and formerly a lead defense counsel at the Office of Military Commissions, agrees.

He told us, “In most cases, either the detainee is unwilling to go back to his country of origin either because we are concerned that country will torture the individual, or we are concerned that the country won’t adequately monitor or control the individual, leaving him free to ‘return to the battlefield’ (or perhaps, more accurately in many cases, go to the battlefield for the first time).”

“The fearmongers in Congress have created an atmosphere in which it is not politically feasible for the Obama Administration to release any detainees in the U.S. This is both unfair and unfortunate, because the single most significant thing the U.S. could do to encourage other countries to accept detainees is to accept a few for resettlement in the U.S.,” he said.









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