U.S. transfers 11 Guantánamo detainees to Yemen after more than two decades without charge
The Pentagon said Monday it had transferred 11 Yemeni men to Oman this week after holding them for more than two decades without charge at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon said Monday it had transferred 11 Yemeni men to Oman this week after holding them for more than two decades without charge at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The transfer was the latest and biggest push by the Biden administration in its final weeks to clear Guantánamo of the last remaining detainees there who were never charged with a crime.
The latest release brings the total number of men detained at Guantánamo to 15. That’s the fewest since 2002, when President George W. Bush’s administration turned Guantánamo into a detention site for the mostly Muslim men taken into custody around the world in what the U.S. called its “war on terror.” The U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and military and covert operations elsewhere followed the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida attacks.
The men in the latest transfer included Shaqawi al Hajj, who had undergone repeated hunger strikes and hospitalizations at Guantánamo to protest his 21 years in prison, preceded by two years of detention and torture in CIA custody, according to the U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights.
Rights groups and some lawmakers have pushed successive U.S. administrations to close Guantánamo or, failing that, release all those detainees never charged with a crime. Guantánamo held about 800 detainees at its peak.
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