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U.S. releases ‘forever prisoner’ from Gitmo to Saudis

He had been held as indefinite detainee since August 2002

The Columbian
Published: November 23, 2014, 12:00am

The U.S. military released to Saudi Arabia this week a captive who was held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for a dozen years, was never charged with a crime but was categorized for a time as a “forever prisoner.”

A Saudi plane fetched Muhammed Zahrani, 45, on Friday, reducing the detainee population at Guantanamo to 142. Days earlier, the U.S. sent five other Arab captives to resettlement in Europe.

The United States disclosed the transfer of the Saudi citizen Saturday morning once Zahrani was back in his homeland.

The sudden spurt in transfers — Zahrani was the 13th released this year — has unsettled some in Congress as the Pentagon works toward President Barack Obama’s goal of closing the prison.

“What the Obama administration is doing is dangerous and, frankly, reckless,” the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., said after Thursday’s transfer.

“If just one U.S. soldier loses their life over these transfers, we will have failed in our duty to the American people,” he said. “Until we can assure the terrorists stay off the battlefield, they must stay behind bars.”

Obama has called Guantánamo a recruitment tool for extremists, damaging to international standing, unnecessary for national security as well as expensive and inefficient.

Zahrani got to Guantanamo on Aug. 5, 2002, and had been held as an indefinite detainee — meaning he was never accused of engaging in war crimes or terrorism but a 2010 federal task force declared him too dangerous to leave the prison. He was considered to be a follower of Osama bin Laden and devoted to al-Qaida.

On Oct. 3, a national security parole board downgraded the threat he posed and endorsed his repatriation, citing his “candor with the board about his presence on the battlefield, expressions of regret and desires for a peaceful life after Guantanamo.” It also noted that Saudi Arabia has a rehabilitation program, he was a well-behaved prisoner and that his family isn’t tied to at-large extremists.

It is not known what he told the board during his May 5 video conference between Guantanamo and Washington because, at Zahrani’s request, both his remarks and written submission were under seal on the parole board website.

Two U.S. military officers assigned to help him advocate for his release called him “a middle-aged, ailing man who desperately wants to return to Saudi Arabia” to receive national health care, go through the country’s detainee rehabilitation program and “start over.”

The officers also said that, based on an intelligence estimate of Zahrani’s dangerousness, he was less of a threat on paper than five Taliban prisoners sent to Qatar in May in exchange for the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was being held as a war prisoner by a militia in Afghanistan.

Zahrani was the second captive whose status was changed by a national security review, called a Periodic Review Board, to go home. Earlier this month, a Kuwaiti jet fetched former forever prisoner Fawzi al Odah, 37, for a rehabilitation program in his Persian Gulf nation.

Leaked prison documents show Pakistani security forces seized him in Lahore in May 2002, along with Guantanamo hunger striker Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian who was cleared for release years before Zahrani and awaits resettlement in Uruguay.

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