The U.S. administration is preparing to release 78 detainees in Guantánamo who have been cleared for release, 27 of whom are Yemeni.
The Obama administration’s task force has cleared a full third of the Guantánamo detainees for release, and the military has posted notices around the camps that indicate for at least some “War-on-Terror” captives, an end to their days spent in Cuba may be on the horizon.
In all, 78 detainees have been cleared according to the notice that was circulated in the prison camps last week. It did not refer to the detainees by name who would be allowed to leave after diplomatic arrangements were made, but instead broke the number down by nationality.
Yemenis account for the largest single group cleared for release, with a total of twenty-seven, which should come as no surprise as about 40 percent of the detainees are citizens of Yemen, the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden.
U.S. diplomats and their Yemeni counterparts have so far failed to reach an over arching repatriation agreement regarding guarantees of security for the men who have been held for years (nearly all without charges brought against them) at the detention center in southeast Cuba.
A Yemeni Embassy statement issued in Washington over the weekend said that Yemen “welcomes with enthusiasm” the single release and transfer of one of its citizens, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed. It vowed to “continue its diplomatic dialogue” with the U.S. government “to repatriate the remaining Yemeni detainees.’’
Over the weekend, the Obama administration sent two Uzbeks to Ireland for resettlement and returned a Yemeni to his homeland in compliance with a judicial order.
Navy Lt. Commander, Brook DeWalt, a Guantánamo spokesman, said that staff began circulating the limited notice of those to be released in September as part of a new information campaign for detainees to track the progress of the review.
An earlier initiative dictated that guards post multilingual copies of President Barak Obama’s January 22nd executive order announcing a one-year time frame for closure in recreation areas, a deadline the Obama administration now says it may not meet.
“We’re not focusing on whether or not the deadline will or won’t be met on a particular day,’’ White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Monday, “we’re focusing on ensuring that the facility is closed and...making the most progress that we can possible.”
Another large group cleared for release includes 13 citizens of China, members of the Uighur Muslim minority, some of whom are likely to be resettled in the Pacific island nation of Palau.
The remaining cleared detainees on the list are as follows:
Nine Tunisians, seven Algerians, four Syrians, four Uzbeks, three Libyans, three Saudis, two Egyptians, two West Bank Palestinians, two Kuwaitis, an Azerbaijani and a Tajik.
Two Syrians went to Portugal in late August, presumably from the four on the cleared list, as part of an Obama administration plea to the European Union to procure third-country resettlement for detainees who might face torture in their native countries.
Even before the closure order, State Department officials had concluded that some detainees from North Africa could not be repatriated once they were released because they had already fled their nations previously for religious reasons.
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