Some Detainees Can't Go Home

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Miami Herald
June 14, 2008 Whatever orders civilian judges might issue under the latest U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the United States is struggling with how to send away some of the detainees at Guantánamo who the Defense Department has already decided to let go.
By Carol Rosenberg
By some measures, Mammar Ameur seems an unlikely candidate to be among the 270 war-on-terror detainees held at the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay..
He has a white beard and bad feet. He has a wife and four kids. And 2 ½ years ago, the Pentagon decided he could go home. Yet he passes his days in Camp 4, a communal Hogan's Heroes-style compound for the most cooperative of captives.
That's because Ameur has the misfortune of being Algerian.
Despite years of talks, the North African nation has so far refused to take home a single one of its citizens held in war-on-terror custody at the U.S. base in southeast Cuba.
Meantime, Ameur is an example of the men for whom Thursday's Supreme Court ruling -- that they can take their cases to U.S. courts -- is likely a hollow victory.
Nowhere to go
Even if a civilian court were to order Ameur's release, he has no place to go. The Pentagon says there are about 70 detainees in a similar predicament.
''[The Algerians] simply decided that they do not want to accept back any of the detainees from the United States,'' said Sandra L. Hodgkinson, the Defense Department deputy in charge of detainee affairs. She called it ``discouraging.''
Last summer, she said, Washington and Algiers agreed on repatriation of a number of Algerians she would not quantify. Then the North African nation reversed course. Its diplomats say that perhaps the men should go back to the countries where they were taken into custody -- locations from South Asia to Sarajevo, but none inside their home countries.
Ameur's may be a typical tale. He says he was a charity worker in Pakistan, a good Muslim who fled a bloody Islamic insurgency in Algeria in the 1990s and ultimately got U.N. refugee status in Pakistan.
In Pakistan, he said, U.S. intelligence officers mistook the home where he and his family lived for an al Qaeda safe house -- and labeled him a terrorist because he had once been trained by al Ittihad al Islami, a Kuwaiti aid group that President Bush listed as a terror organization after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Fatherless family
After that, his wife and kids moved back to Algeria, and the children have grown up without him, says his attorney, Ramzi Kassem, a teaching fellow at the Yale Law School.
''He wants to be back home with his family. That's what he's always wanted. It's really not much more complicated than that,'' said Kassem.
But where to go? Back to Pakistan, whose security forces helped the United States round up the Guantánamo-bound suspects in the first place? To a third country?
The military has gradually thinned the ranks of prisoners at Guantánamo by getting their home governments to take them. Nearly 100 Saudi Arabians have been sent home to state-run rehabilitation programs designed to rid them of any vestiges of radical Islam.
The U.S. is likewise negotiating the return of many of the 100 or so detained Yemenis.
''I think the brutally frank answer is that we're stuck,'' Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a Senate committee May 20, when asked how the various agencies of the Bush administration were handling the task of moving toward closure of the prison camps at Guantánamo Bay.
Opposition
There are also 25 detainees whose opposition to their home governments makes them likely subjects of political retribution.
Chief among them are the 17 Uighurs -- Chinese citizens from an ethnic Islamic minority who fled their homeland for Afghanistan long before the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. government now agrees that they would suffer religious oppression as devout Muslims if returned to China, a communist country.
 
Back
Top