US lifts ban on Gitmo transfers to Yemen
A step toward closing military prison
WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama is lifting his self-imposed ban on transferring Guantanamo Bay detainees to Yemen, a step toward his goal of closing the US military-run prison that he said “has become a symbol around the world for an America that flouts the rule of law.”
Nearly 100 of the 166 terrorist suspects held at the prison in Cuba are from Yemen and have had nowhere to go even if they had been cleared for transfer. Obama wouldn’t send them home, and no other country was welcoming them. Their hopelessness after a decade or more of imprisonment has contributed to a hunger strike at the detention facility that helped reignite the longstalled effort to close it.
A leadership upheaval in Yemen has improved the country’s security but not eliminated a terrorist organization trying to recruit jihadists. But Obama’s decision announced Thursday is not without risk. Detainees who have been released to Yemen in the past have joined terrorist fighters in the Arab nation. The security concerns prompted Obama to suspend transfers to Yemen in January 2010 after a Nigerian man attempted to blow up a US-bound flight on Christmas Day 2009 with explosives hidden in his underwear on instructions from alQaida operatives in Yemen. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, an opposition Republican, was among those on Capitol Hill criticizing Obama’s change in policy. “Between December 2009 and today, has Yemen shown any indication that they are more capable of looking after those individuals? Absolutely not,” Chambliss said. “And If we were to transfer those individuals to Yemen, it would be just like turning them loose.”
Yemeni watchers in the US say there is reason to hope security has improved since longtime authoritarian leader Ali Abdullah Saleh was ousted after mass uprisings last year. Al-Qaeda had been on the upswing under Saleh, but his successor, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, has made fighting terrorism a top goal and restored cooperation with the United States in the effort.
Obama announced that he was lifting the moratorium on Yemeni transfers in a speech at the National Defense University in which he also defended targeted killings by US aerial drones and pushed Congress anew to authorize Guantanamo’s closure. The president did not explain his rationale behind the change in Yemen policy, but senior administration officials cited Hadi’s leadership as an increasingly able partner to the US.
A Yemeni official told The AP that a delegation, including the country’s human rights minister, returned this week after a trip to Washington, where they agreed to set up of a rehabilitation center to help reintegrate detainees with the support of the US and other Arab nations. Rageh Badi, an adviser to Yemen’s prime minister, said in an interview that the transfer ban had cast a shadow on the relations with the United States. Badi said lifting the ban is a “welcome step, a progressive one that removes much of the ambiguity and confusion between the US administration and the Yemeni government.” Yemeni authorities previously had a system to monitor returned detainees, but it ceased to function after massive anti-government protests swept most of the country, starting in early 2011. Of the estimated 30 Yemenis who returned from Guantanamo, only a handful had stayed in Sanaa, the capital, while the rest moved to remote areas where government authority is minimal, or nonexistent.