Gitmo's prisoners in the doldrums

"You know, I just don't see how he's going to do it. Is he planning to put two-hundred-odd men on a plane January 21st and ship them to God knows where?"

That was Adel al Gazzar at our last meeting at Guantánamo. The sentiment he voiced echoes through the halls of the prison these days.  There is a heavy hush of two hundred men just...waiting.  Tallying the days since a promise was made. Counting their freed fellows on two hands.  It doesn't take long to count to 19.

Adel's a savvy guy, and could easily tell you what's gone wrong, why someone like him--fluent in English, master's in economics, told since about 2005 that he'd get out any day now--is stuck in prison with nowhere to go.

One, he'd say the Obama administration missed the chance to set the US public right on Guantánamo.  If you think everyone gets it by now, you haven't seen Fox News this year. You missed pundits spluttering that 'al-Qaida trained' Uighurs might be settling in sleepy towns outside Washington.  But I'll tell you who didn't miss it: Congress.  They flocked to a NIMBY bill--the statutory equivalent of a sign saying ALL TERRISTS KEEP OUT--like sheep to a barn in a thunderstorm. 

The administration met this misinformation campaign by rolling over.  Four Uighurs were quietly shipped to Bermuda.  Passing Americans curious who the Uighurs actually were should try this experiment at home: Google 'Uighurs Bermuda' for images of men engaged in shocking acts like ice-cream-eating, ocean-swimming, and lawn-tending at a local golf course.  Those are the men Congress protected you from.  There are many left, Adel, Uighurs, and others, trapped by fearmongering and the administration's silence in the face of it.

Meanwhile, spinelessness on resettlement dampened Europe's will to help.  Countries who'd signaled they might accept a handful of the sixty refugees--say, four or five to Portgual, a half dozen to France--now are taking one or two. You can understand their logic: why should we clean up America's mess?  But dozens of refugees are paying the price. Our client Nabil Hadjarab, son of a French-Algerian veteran, is still waiting and hoping for his ticket to Paris.

We at Reprieve think Europe should do more--for the EU stopovers of rendition flights, for the European interrogator visits to Gitmo, and for basic human decency--but so, to be sure, should the Americans. If no one bends, Gitmo won't close.

And then, Adel would have to admit, there's the unluckiest group of all: the Yemenis.  A Washington Post article from today sketches the same dismal policy that has kept about a hundred men in limbo for eight years.  Yemen is, in a word, unstable.  But then, so is Afghanistan, so is Pakistan, so are any number of places where the US has sent and will send Gitmo prisoners.  Someone, however, has persuaded the deciders that nobody can safely return to Yemen without Saudi (or Saudi-style) reeducation.  Pres. Ali Abdullah Saleh, for his part, has done little to get his citizens out, but blocked their transfer to his neighbors up north. The result is that nobody moves.

Nobody, that is, without a court order.  As it happens, the sky did not fall when a fed-up federal judge insisted that a Yemeni, Alla bin Ali Ahmed, be sent home--not pending reeducation, not diplomacy permitting, but immediately.  There is zero reason the US could not do the same for the twenty-seven Yemenis it has already cleared.  It shouldn't take tirades from the bench. 

Some say Yemenis jailed baselessly can't be turned loose because they might be angry and might then seek to harm us from the local branch of al-Qa'ida.  Having met several Yemenis--Samir Mukbel and three others--I know what nonsense that is.  Samir frets of dowries and jobs.  He is desperate to move on.  As an American, I think the notion that we have to hold on to Samir because we should never have held him in the first place is appalling.

Adel wants to believe Obama can still cross the finish line in a hundred days.  I do too.  But attitudes have to change--in the White House, on the Hill, and across the US--if that is to have any chance of happening.  There are dozens of soluble cases left in Gitmo.  All we need is a government with the courage to do the right thing.