SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, 25 December 2004 — US authorities are releasing one of 11 Kuwaiti detainees held at a military detention center for terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, raising questions about why others are not being freed.
Nasser Al-Mutairi, a 26-year-old employee of the Kuwaiti Education Ministry whose family says he was teaching English in Afghanistan when he was captured three years ago, is expected home soon aboard a special plane sent by the Kuwaiti government, said Khaled Al-Odha, the father of another Kuwaiti detainee.
US officials declined to comment. “Our policy has always been that if detainees are transferred we will only announce it once it is complete,” said Defense Department spokesman Maj. Michael Shavers. He confirmed that department also refuses to give information about individual detainees.
The lack of information about Al-Mutairi’s apparently imminent release “demonstrates the arbitrariness of all the decisions made in Guantanamo ... This demonstrates the need for transparency,” said Michael Ratner, a lawyer for the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights which is fighting in US courts for the detainees to be charged or freed.
Some 550 men from more than 45 countries are currently held at Guantanamo Bay, most captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. They are accused of ties to Al-Qaeda, the terrorist network accused of committing the attacks, or Afghanistan’s ousted Taleban regime that sheltered it.
Since the Guantanamo Bay detention mission started in January 2002, up to 750 men from more than 50 countries have been held there for interrogations about terrorism. The Defense Department and White House officials contended the men’s location outside the United States precludes them access to the US justice system. But the US Supreme Court ruled in the summer that the prisoners do have the right to contest their detention without charge and dozens of cases are pending.
Two hundred and two men have been released from Guantanamo Bay, said Maj. Michael Shavers. He said he could not immediately say how many of those were freed when they reached their country of origin. Many are from countries friendly to the United States, like Britain, and some were ill.
Al-Odha said his wife has been unable to sleep or cook since the allegations surfaced. “My family, which has been in grief for a long time, is living a nightmare since we heard news of these abuses,” he said.
His son, Fawzi, had gone to Pakistan to teach in a poor border village as he did each summer, and had stayed on after the Sept. 11 attacks to do charitable work with Afghan refugees, he said.
Tom Wilner, a lawyer hired by the Kuwaiti government to fight for the Kuwaiti detainees to be charged or returned to their country, said he did not understand why Al-Mutairi was being released, as opposed to other Kuwaiti detainees.
He said some were being held because they wore Casio watches that have a compass — something many Muslims have because it orients them toward Makkah.
Meanwhile, a prisoner who allegedly recruited young men to work for the Taleban regime was one of two detainees who appeared Thursday before US military review tribunals in Guantanamo, an official said.
The 33-year-old was in charge of a police precinct in the Mazar-e-Sharif province in Afghanistan, said Lt. Cmdr. Daryl Borgquist, a Pentagon spokesman. He allegedly conscripted “young men for the Taleban by simply grabbing them off the street,” Borgquist said. The detainee also allegedly accepted money for the Taleban from young men who didn’t want to be conscripted.
It was unclear, however, what the detainee said at his hearing, which no press attended. The Associated Press filed a Freedom of Information Act request more than a month ago to obtain transcripts of the testimonies, as well as copies of the men’s written statements.
The tribunals also heard from a 35-year-old man with alleged links to the Taleban and the Al-Qaeda terror network. The military accused the prisoner of working for the Society for the Revival of Islamic Heritage, which is listed under the US Department of Homeland Security’s list of terrorist organizations, Borgquist said.
The military did not release the name or nationality of either prisoner.
