When President Obama took office in 2009, there were 242 detainees still in the Guantanamo Bay prison, down from a high of nearly 700.
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The recipient of the 15 transfers was the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who has accepted transfers from Gitmo in the past.
The UAE has accepted released prisoners twice before – one UAE citizen repatriated in 2008 and five Yemenis resettled previous year.
The administration has been overt in its intentions to close down the detention center.
“The United States is grateful to the government of the United Arab Emirates for its continued assistance in closing the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay”, Lee Wolosky, the State Department special envoy who negotiates such transfers, said in a statement. The Yemenis previously sent to the UAE are believed to have been placed in a government-run rehabilitation and monitoring program, The Associated Press reports, although details are unclear. A Pentagon profile from Sept 2015 said he expressed dislike of the United States, which they identified as “an emotion that probably is motivated more by frustration over his continuing detention than by a commitment to global jihad”. “They’ve been banned from traveling and any meaningful communication”. The debate is further complicated by former Guantánamo prisoners who have actually rejoined terrorist groups after their release, although the record appears to be improving: At least 21 percent of detainees released during the Bush administration re-engaged in terrorism, compared to 5 percent during Obama’s, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
Monday’s announcement represents the largest transfer of prisoners under the Obama administration.
After taking office in 2009, Obama vowed to close down the prison but has been met with resistance from congress which has made his goal hard to accomplish.
“In its race to close Gitmo, the Obama administration is doubling down on policies that put American lives at risk”, Republican Rep. Ed Royce, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement.
Obama is facing fierce opposition from Republicans who assert releasing all of these once-suspected terrorists will come back to haunt the United States. That compares with 21 percent confirmed and 14 percent suspected during the Bush administration. Since then, one was released to Montenegro, one to Italy and two to Serbia. He had been accused of hiding and storing mines to be used against USA forces in Afghanistan.
In clearing him for transfer, the review board said he hasn’t expressed any anti-U.S. sentiment or intent to re-engage in militant activities.
Some have been stranded on that list for years because they could not be repatriated.
A Pentagon profile from September 2015 said he expressed dislike of the US, which they identified as “an emotion that probably is motivated more by frustration over his continuing detention than by a commitment to global jihad”.
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Since its opening after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, the prison has held almost 800 men. He was identified as an Afghan national named Obaidullah. Another of bin Laden’s close confidants, al Nashiri planned the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen and worked closely with the most senior al-Qaeda leaders until his capture in UAE in 2002.
