Mohammed Al Gharani was the youngest detainee at Guantanamo Bay.
Now, seven years later, he has returned to Chad, his country of origin, after being freed and is adjusting to life without the fear of being brutalised.
Al Gharani spoke to Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Vall about his first days of freedom and the abuse he had endured at Guantanamo.
Send to KindleLONDON (Reuters) – The youngest detainee held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, seized when he was just 14 years old, has been released after seven years in captivity, his lawyers said on Thursday.
Mohammed El Gharani, a Chadian citizen, was set free five months after a U.S. federal judge ordered him released after reviewing the evidence against him and ruling that it did not prove he was ever an “enemy combatant”.
Gharani has already returned to Chad, his lawyers said. There was no immediate confirmation from U.S. authorities of his release.
“It is great news that Mohammed has at last been released, but he will never get back the teenage years that were spent in Guantanamo based on shamefully shoddy intelligence,” said Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer and the director of Reprieve, a human rights group that has fought for his release.
“The idea that it took seven years and a federal judge to sort this out demonstrates just how failed an experiment Guantanamo Bay is.”
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 A pre-capture photo of Mohammed el Gharani, a native of
Chad and long-held captive at the U.S. Navy base at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who has repeatedly protested
claims of abuse by U.S. military personnel.
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A Guantánamo detainee used his prison camp telephone privileges to ring up a reporter with the Middle Eastern news network al Jazeera and complain that he had been abused by prison camp guards, the U.S. military and network said Tuesday.
Mohammed el Gharani, whose attorneys say he was captured at age 14, in Pakistan, got the phone privileges in Camp Iguana, a transitional holding site for detainees awaiting release.
He is a citizen of Chad who reportedly grew up in Saudi Arabia and was in Pakistan studying at the time he was captured by security forces, and turned over to the United States for interrogation.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ordered Gharani’s release on Jan. 14 in a ruling that found the Pentagon’s ”mosaic of allegations” did not justify his indefinite detention as an al Qaeda suspect. He has been held at Guantánamo without charge since 2002.
Two weeks ago, the young Gharani could be plainly seen living inside Camp Iguana, a razor-wire-ringed compound where he and 17 citizens of China, called Uighurs, await resettlement. Guards say that Iguana has greater privileges, including fast-food deliveries, group prayer, sports and videos.
Send to Kindleby Andy Worthington
In 2007, after four rounds of administrative reviews at Guantánamo, Hedi Hammamy, a Tunisian prisoner, born in 1969, was cleared for release, having satisfied the Pentagon that he no longer represented a threat to the United States or its allies and no longer possessed any ongoing intelligence value. He was not released, however, because, although the U.S. government had secured a “diplomatic assurance” from the government of the Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, which purported to guarantee that returned prisoners would be treated humanely, two prisoners returned in June 2007 were apparently mistreated in Tunisian custody and were then imprisoned after what were regarded by human rights observers as show trials.
This prompted a district court judge to prevent the return of a third Tunisian in November 2007, with the result that this man, Lotfi bin Ali, and several other cleared Tunisians — including Hedi Hammamy — have languished in Guantánamo ever since, as the State Department has tried in vain to find a third country prepared to accept them.
Send to Kindle(Washington, DC) – The US Department of Justice should expedite the review and provide education and other rehabilitation assistance for five detainees at Guantanamo who have been held there since they were children, Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder. The detainees were brought to Guantanamo between the ages of 15 and 17, and have now been in detention there for more than six years.
“The United States has consistently flouted its international obligations on the treatment of children in detention,” said Jo Becker, children’s rights advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. “Obama’s team should make these cases one of its first priorities.”
Send to KindleIn January 2002, the Pentagon began imprisoning men it described as “very hard cases”—“the worst of the worst” terrorists in American custody—at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. During the next seven years it released more than 500 of them. “What’s left,” Vice President Dick Cheney declared in the final week of the Bush administration, “is the hard core.” That was a few days before the Pentagon released half a dozen more.
Unless the Bush administration recklessly loosed hundreds of hardened terrorists on the world, its initial descriptions of the detainees were mistaken. That pattern of error reinforces the argument against allowing the executive branch to wield the unchallengeable authority it asserted at Guantanamo.
Send to KindleBy Andy Worthington
Those of us who prefer justice to arbitrary and unaccountable detention without charge or trial were delighted when, last week, Barack Obama fulfilled a long-stated promise and issued a presidential order stating that Guantánamo will be closed “as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order,” and establishing an immediate review of the cases of the remaining 242 prisoners to work out whether they can be released.
A year is a long time, of course, if you’re unfortunate enough to have been imprisoned in Guantánamo for up to seven years with no way of asking why you’re being held, but some of us were prepared to give the new President the benefit of the doubt, and to consider that perhaps he didn’t want to make a rash promise that he might find himself unable to fulfill, such as pledging to close the wretched place in a matter of months.
Recent events, however, have demonstrated that, although President Obama has set in motion a policy that addresses the prisoners’ future, their long desire to have an opportunity to question the basis of their detention is currently being addressed not in the White House but in the District Courts, following an epic, four-year struggle between the Supreme Court and Congress to grant them their wish. Since the justices of the Supreme Court decisively ended this struggle last June, by ruling that Congress had acted unconstitutionally when it stripped the prisoners of the habeas corpus rights that the Supreme Court had granted them in June 2004, a raft of previously marooned habeas cases has been making its way through the District Courts.
Send to KindleOver the weekend, yet another hapless prisoner stuck at Guantanamo Bay for the last six years was determined to have been wrongly detained, this time by a military panel that decided he “should no longer be deemed an enemy combatant.”
The panel’s decision was not publicly announced, but was reported Sunday by William Glaberson in The New York Times. Glaberson notes that this is just the most recent of two dozen such cases that have been decided over the last three months.
Last week, I reported on the case of Mohammed al-Gharani, who was ordered released after a federal judge determined there was insufficient evidence that, as the Bush administration argued, al-Gharani had been a member of al-Qaeda when he was 11-years-old, and a dangerous “enemy combatant” when American authorities arrested him in Pakistan at age 14. The evidence against him had come from two other prisoners at Gitmo that even the government had deemed unreliable.
Send to Kindleby Alexander
“The white man says, there is freedom and justice for all. We have had “freedom and justice,” and that is why we have been almost exterminated. We shall not forget this.” – 1927 Grand Council of American Indians
With the promise of newly inaugurated president Obama to close Guantanamo Bay comes many questions relevant to both the recent past and future of social justice in America. This promise comes at a price, and well too late for many who are completely innocent, or for enabling basic due process for those who should have been able to receive fair trials rather than unending and unchallengeable detention. But denying even basic due process, whether through tainted or entirely manufactured evidence, abusive interrogation, or by false witnesses, has a long history in the United States, as one can learn from America’s longest surviving political prisoner, Leonard Peltier.
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Palestine Diaries – Live from Palestine
