Guantanamo Yemen transfers queried
US says repatriations will continue despite some legislators’ fears.
“We’re making sure that the situation on the ground is taken into account, that we continue to work with the Yemeni government, and we do this in a very commonsense fashion because we want to make sure that we are able to close Guantanamo.”
Repatriations questioned
Many of the legislators calling for the re-think support closing the Guantanamo Bay, a commitment made by Barack Obama, the US president, at the time of his election.
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But concerns over repatriating Yemenis emerged in the wake of a failed attempt to bomb a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day.
The man accused of trying to bomb the flight allegedly received training and explosives from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a group based in Yemen.
Both Democratic and Republican senators warned last week of a possible security disaster if Washington transferred detainees back to Yemen without guarantees from Sanaa that they will not return to the battlefield.
Joe Lieberman, an independent senator from Connecticut who has opposed closing Guantanamo, also said transferring any of the Yemeni detainees back home would be irresponsible.
“We know from past experience that some of them will be back in the fight against us,” Lieberman said on news network ABC.
‘Political firestorm’
But David Remes a lawyer for some of the Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo who have returned to their country, said that the government should not allow politics to derail the repatriations.
“The Obama administration has been going through a very rigorous individual-by-individual assessment of the detainees it’s returning home,” he told Al Jazeera.
“It’s only returning detainees home that it’s determined present no danger to the United States, either because a court has ruled that the men are being unlawfully held or because an inter-agency review team … have concluded that these particular men are not a threat to the United States.”
He said it was “very unfortunate that these men from Yemen who are detained in Guantanamo, some for eight or nine years, are getting caught up in the political firestorm”.
Obama has already abandoned his pledge to close Guantanamo by January 22, but no new deadline has been set.