US sends 6 long-cleared prisoners from Guantanamo to Uruguay

The U.S. military dropped off six long-ago cleared Guantanamo captives in Uruguay on Sunday – culminating a complex, on-again, off-again year-long deal to resettle the men in the nation of President Jose Mujica, himself a long-held political prisoner.

Among the six was hunger striker Abu Wa’el Dhiab, 43, whose failed federal court fight to stop the military from force feeding him raised his profile among the half-dozen little-known detainees from Syria, Palestine and Tunisia.

None has ever been charged with a crime, and now all are to start new lives in the South American nation with the help of some Spanish lessons offered to them since March at the U.S. Navy prison in Cuba.

All six prisoners sent to Uruguay got to Guantanamo in 2002.

The other five men, in their 30s and 40s, were identified as Syrians Abdelhadi Faraj, Ahmed Adnan Ahjam, Ali Hussein al Shabaan, Tunisian Adel Bin Mohammed Ouerghi and Palestinian Mohammed Taha Matan.

Dhiab’s attorney, Alka Pradhan, said Dhiab was extremely frail in his final months at Guantanamo and “wants to put this nightmare behind him.”

She said he was particularly grateful to Mujica for “recognizing that he is a victim of injustice and for giving him the opportunity to build a new life” for himself and family, a wife and three children he hadn’t seen for 13 years.

He once ran a restaurant, the lawyer said, hopes “that once he recovers from the mistreatment and ill health he suffered at Guantanamo, he can revive those skills.”

The Uruguyan transfer, nearly a year in the making, was one of the worst-kept secrets in Guantanamo’s usually clandestine deal making. A prison camp admiral prematurely disclosed it, members of Congress openly questioned it and domestic politics in both nations repeatedly sidelined it.

Yet the State Department envoy who negotiated it, Cliff Sloan, called it “a major milestone” in the Obama administration’s continuing search for nations willing to resettle the remaining 67 cleared detainees held at Guantanamo among 136 foreign captives.

The weekend release cleared Guantanamo’s last four Syrian detainees, meaning the prison now holds captives from 18 nations. The majority are Yemeni, like the men who just left for Uruguay, ineligible for repatriation even with security agreements because of violence and instability in their homelands.

As a result, Obama administration officials have long considered the Mujica deal a lynchpin in their goal of closing the Guantanamo prison by finding more resettlement nations in largely untapped South America.

Mujica has been described as the Nelson Mandela of Latin America, a rebel-turned-peacemaker. Now, U.S. officials hope he has the moral authority to persuade other regional leaders to take in cleared captives, too.

In January, Sloan, the State Department special envoy for Guantanamo closure, traveled to Uruguay to pitch the idea, according to Obama administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about it.

He found the nation’s now 79-year-old president, Mujica, sympathetic as a former 14-year political prisoner who spent much of his captivity in solitary confinement for his guerrilla activities with the Tupamaro revolutionary movement.

In February, Uruguay sent a delegation to the U.S. Navy base in Cuba to interview detainees. They chose six for resettlement, among them Dhiab, a 6-foot-5-inch sickly man whose lawyers said refused to eat not to die but to protest his indefinite detention despite notice that he could leave once a nation agreed to take him.

While some quarters of the U.S. government were pleased with the deal, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was slow to approve it. It sat on his desk for months, awaiting his signature, while intelligence analysts evaluated it. Before he signed it, the White House ordered the truly clandestine transfer of five Taliban prisoners to Qatar in a trade for POW Bowe Bergdahl on May 31 – drawing protest on Capitol Hill that Congress had not been informed in advance.

Hagel finally approved the Uruguay release in July and sent the required 30-day notice to Congress.

Disclosure of the agreement to take in Guantanamo prisoners stirred domestic debate in Uruguay in the midst of the presidential campaign to pick Mujica’s successor. Mujica, who under term limits must step down next year, announced that he would postpone their arrival until his successor was elected, so they could consult on the deal.

Uruguay elected Mujica’s party ally, Tabare Vazquez, on Nov. 30, and the offer of sanctuary was back on track. The six men were flown from the remote U.S. Navy base late Saturday night.

Within hours, Sloan released a statement:

“We are very grateful to Uruguay for this important humanitarian action, and to President Mujica for his strong leadership in providing a home for individuals who cannot return to their own countries.

“The support we are receiving from our friends and allies is critical to achieving our shared goal of closing Guantanamo, and this transfer is a major milestone in our efforts to close the facility.”

In the interim between the deal and delivery of the six detainees, the U.S. government resettled five other Arabs in Europe and repatriated a Kuwaiti and Saudi. Justice Department lawyers also defended the treatment of Guantanamo hunger strikers in a federal court challenge brought by Dhiab that would never have happened had the deal not been sidelined.

In the end, Judge Gladys Kessler ruled that how the U.S. troops treated Dhiab was not intentionally designed to inflict pain on the Syrian, whom she called “clearly a very sick, depressed, and desperate man.”

Kessler wrote, “It is hard for those of us in the continental United States to fully understand his situation and the atmosphere at Guantanamo Bay. He has been cleared for release since 2009 and one can only hope that that release will take place shortly.”

The case cast a harsh spotlight on prison conditions and uncovered videos of Dhiab’s is treatment that both his attorneys and 16 news organizations, including the Miami Herald and its parent company McClatchy, want released to the public.

A glance at the men released

About the six men released from Guantanamo and sent to Uruguay, based on leaked Department of Defense prison documents:

This story was originally published December 7, 2014 at 8:08 AM.