U.S. judge orders release of 5 of the 6 'Bosnian Algerians' detained in Guantanamo

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Trois détenus de Guantanamo, dont un Algérien, bientôt transférés

Mardi 9 Juin 2009 -- Trois détenus de Guantanamo, dont un Algérien arrêté fin 2001 en Bosnie et totalement innocenté par la justice américaine, doivent être transférés « très prochainement », a-t-on appris mardi de sources proches du dossier. Saber Lahmar, 39 ans, blanchi par un juge fédéral en novembre 2008 après sept ans et demi à Guantanamo, devait partir vers la Bosnie, selon ces sources. L'identité des deux autres détenus en passe d'être transférés et leur
destination n'ont pas été précisées.

Actuellement, un jeune homme de nationalités tchadienne et saoudienne, totalement innocenté par un juge depuis des mois, attend son transfèrement dans la partie la moins contraignante du camp de détention qui abrite aujourd'hui environ 240 détenus.

Innocentés depuis des années mais refusant de rentrer en Chine, où ils affirment risquer des persécutions, dix-sept Chinois musulmans de la minorité ouïghoure y sont également emprisonnés, en attente d'un pays tiers acceptant de les accueillir.

Arrêté à l'automne 2001, sous le soupçon qu'il fomentaient un attentat contre l'ambassade américaine de Sarajevo avec cinq autres Algériens dont Lakhdar Boumediene, récemment arrivé en France, M. Lahmar résidait légalement en Bosnie, marié à une citoyenne bosniaque. Interrogé par l'AFP, un de ses avocats, Robert Kirsh, a néanmoins assuré que celui-ci avait émis le voeu de ne pas être renvoyé en Bosnie. "On lui a dit que la situation là-bas n'était pas bonne", a-t-il expliqué, en référence à trois de ses compagnons d'infortune transférés vers Sarajevo dès décembre parce que citoyens bosniaques et "mal traités par le gouvernement".

M. Kirsh a reconnu que son client avait déposé au départ une demande pour être accueilli en Bosnie avant de faire une demande officielle à la France. Selon lui, M. Lahmar qui a passé de longs mois à l'isolement total durant sa détention est très déprimé, notamment parce qu'il est le dernier du groupe de cinq Algériens innocentés par un juge fédéral à demeurer à Guantanamo.

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Trois détenus de Guantanamo, dont un Algérien, bientôt transférés

Three more Guantanamo inmates await transfer

WASHINGTON, June 9, 2009 (AFP) — Three Guantanamo inmates who have been cleared of terror charges will be transferred from the facility "very soon," U.S. sources told AFP Tuesday.

The three detainees to be released from the infamous war on terror facility in southern Cuba include Saber Lahmar, 39, an Algerian arrested in Bosnia at the end of 2001 who was cleared by a U.S. judge in November 2008 after seven and a half years' confinement.

The two other soon-to-be-freed inmates remain unidentified, but one of them is a young man with dual Chad and Saudi nationalities who has already been cleared for release.

Robert Kirsch, an attorney representing the Algerian prisoner, told AFP that his client fears being sent back to Bosnia.

"He has been told that conditions there are bad," Kirsch said, adding that Lahmar also believed he would not be treated well by the Bosnian government.

News of the inmates' imminent release comes ahead of a court hearing Tuesday for Tanzanian terror suspect held at the facility for nearly three years.

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility since September 2006, was to be arraigned in a federal court in New York at 4:00 pm (2000 GMT).

He is accused of having helped plot the August 7, 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya.

His court case is a first test for White House plans to shut down Guantanamo and bring inmates to trial or send them to their countries of origin.

So far, only two out of the facility's roughly 240 detainees have been able to leave the camp since January because of challenges finding countries to take them.

Seventeen Uighur Chinese nationals captured in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan have been cleared, but remain at Guantanamo where they have been held for the past seven years.

President Barack Obama has vowed to close down the detention center by January 22, 2010, and hopes to convince other countries to take in some of the 50 detainees cleared for release.

The U.S. Congress however is opposing moves to let former detainees into the United States.

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Lawyers urge U.S. to halt plans to send Guantanamo prisoner to Bosnia; fears transfer to Algeria

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, August 21, 2009 (AP) — A Guantanamo prisoner who has been cleared for release by a U.S. judge was fighting Friday against what his lawyers said was an apparent plan to send him to Bosnia, where he would likely be deported to his native Algeria and imprisoned. Saber Lahmar said the International Committee of the Red Cross told him the U.S. would soon transfer him from the American base in Cuba to Bosnia despite concerns about what may happen upon arrival, said Stephen Oleskey, one of his lawyers. Because the diplomatic efforts on behalf of Guantanamo prisoners are secret, it was impossible to confirm the account.

His lawyers say the prisoner is distraught over the situation and they have made a last-minute appeal to the State Department to halt the alleged transfer. Oleskey said he believes his client may be among several prisoners expected to be released in coming days. "We all want to see Guantanamo closed and emptied out but nobody should be sent to a place where they could be harmed," Oleskey said.

Lahmar, 40, is one of six Algerians who were detained in Bosnia in 2001 on suspicion of plotting to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo. They were taken to Guantanamo in January 2002. A judge ordered five of them released for lack of evidence, but found there was enough reason to believe the sixth was close to an al-Qaida operative and tried to help others travel to Afghanistan to fight the United States and its allies. Of those cleared, three were released to their families in Bosnia, where they have citizenship, and one was sent to France. Lahmar has been held back while authorities try to find a country to accept him. He was a resident of Bosnia at the time of his capture but never got citizenship there.

The prisoner is one of dozens who have been cleared for release from Guantanamo but whose transfer has been stalled by the difficulty of persuading other countries to accept men that the U.S. has accused of having links to terrorism and refuses to allow within its own borders. There are about 229 prisoners at the American prison in Cuba that President Barack Obama has pledged to close in January.

Lahmar also alleges he was assaulted by Guantanamo guards in a 1 a.m. confrontation Wednesday in an isolation cell. He told his lawyers he was struck, kicked and punched and that one of his teeth was knocked out. A prison spokesman, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt, said guards were called to remove Lahmar from his cell but the prisoner was "passive" and easily removed. "The allegation is an absolute and total exaggeration," DeWalt said. "It was totally non-combative."

State Department officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Lahmar's case and a Department of Justice spokesman, Dean Boyd, said the U.S. cannot comment on the specifics of any pending release from Guantanamo until after it has been completed. But Boyd said the U.S. "as a matter of policy" does not send prisoners to countries where they would likely face inhumane treatment.

Oleskey, a Boston-based attorney whose firm represented all six of the Algerians, said Lahmar told him Wednesday the U.S. intended to send him within three days to Bosnia, where his residency permit has expired. "If he goes to Bosnia, he will be put in a deportation camp for immigrants," the lawyer said. He said that Algerian authorities would likely arrest him because of the taint of Guantanamo, not anything he actually did in that country. His lawyers are seeking to have him sent to a country in Western Europe that has begun considering an application to resettle him. They declined to specify the country.

Lahmar moved to Bosnia in the 1990s to work as an Arabic language teacher and married a Bosnian woman. He was convicted of robbery in 1997, but was pardoned and released from jail, his lawyers said. He divorced the woman in 1999 and married another Bosnian, with whom he has a daughter who was born after he was taken into custody.

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The Algerian Six

August 24, 2009 -- Seven months after his release from Guantanamo Bay, Mustafa Ait Idr cautiously sips coffee in a Sarajevo café. His face is still partially paralyzed and numb from when guards pinned him onto gravel and jumped on him. He is nursing a broken finger - punishment for refusing to strip naked in his cell. On another occasion, his head was held in a toilet for prolonged periods of time. Now a free man, Ait Idr proudly displays his Bosnian ID card, which was only recently reinstated. He is still unable to find employment or access his bank accounts, which were frozen shortly after his arrest in 2001. He has seen his wife twice in the past seven years; upon his release, he met his youngest son for the first time.

Ait Idr is one of "The Algerian Six," a group of Bosnian citizens detained at Guantanamo Bay for seven years and recently released with all charges dropped. The Algerian men came to Bosnia in the 1990s. Upon demand from U.S. officials, the men were arrested in October 2001 on allegations that they were planning an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo. During a meeting between international officials, Christopher Hoh, the U.S. chargé d'affaires, reportedly told the then Bosnian Prime Minister, Alija Behmen, that the U.S. would cut all diplomatic relations if the men were not arrested. "If we leave Bosnia, God save your country," Hoh said, according to documents filed by the detainees' American lawyers, the Wilmer Hale law firm. The U.S. Embassy temporarily closed during this time. Behmen, leader of a fragile, post-conflict country, noted, "We were not interested in introducing a new period of instability in Bosnia." Within a week, Bosnian police detained "The Algerian Six": Hajj Boudella, Lakhdar Boumediene, Mustafa Ait Idr, Mohammad Nechle, Saber Lahmar and Bensayah Belkacem. After a three-month long Bosnian investigation found no evidence linking the men to terrorist activities or justifying their detainment, the Bosnian Supreme Court ordered their immediate release. High Representative Wolfgang Petritsch stated, "the U.S. put a tremendous amount of pressure" on Bosnia to deport the men. Vijay Padmanabhan, a lawyer for The State Department, denied the charge, claiming, "The U.S. does not threaten or intimidate." Christopher Hoh never offered any official comment.

On the bitterly cold evening of January 17, 2002, over 150 protestors arrived at the Sarajevo courthouse, anticipating the U.S. would seize the men. In an interview in Sarajevo, Boudella's wife, Nadja Dizdarevic, recalls the last time she saw her husband. "Through the car window, he said we were only little pawns in a big political game," she says, blue eyes peering from behind her gray burqa. Three days later, illegally stripped of their Bosnian citizenship, the men arrived handcuffed and blindfolded at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, where they spent the following seven years, despite original allegations being repeatedly discredited. Held without legal representation for three years, Wilmer Hale took on the case pro bono in 2004. Stephen Oleskey, an attorney on the case, declares, "Virtually every claim made by the U.S. government to justify our clients' illegal rendition was eventually dropped. There was never any real evidence." One detainee, Nechle, was flagged because of his mandatory service in the Algerian army a decade ago, as a cook. Ait Idr was presumed dangerous because he taught Bosnian orphans martial arts. Military tribunal transcripts reveal one U.S. officer saying, "At this point, we don't know why you are being accused of being a member of the Armed Islamic Group... Do you have any idea why you are being connected with this group?" "I don't know," Boudella replied.

In June 2008, the landmark Supreme Court case, Boumediene v. Bush, allowed enemy combatants to seek judicial review of their detainment, reinstating habeas corpus. Four months later, Judge Richard Leon released five of the men and continued detention of the sixth, stating, "To allow enemy combatancy to rest on so thin a reed would be inconsistent with this court's obligation... This is a unique case." In a nod to the Obama Administration's pledge to close Guantanamo Bay, President Sarkozy accepted the plaintiff, Lakhmar Boumediene, in May 2009, allowing him to settle in France. Upon his release, Boumediene necessitated 11 days of treatment in a French hospital. During an interview in Paris, he reveals scars from shackles and nasal skin breakdown from forced tube-feedings. "I lived in a nightmare for seven years. Even animals are treated better." Boumediene recalls the cold isolation rooms he endured without clothes and interrogation under bright lights, with Arabic translators who frequently made mistakes in translation. "I went to the bathroom shackled, with guards. They didn't let me sleep for 16 days," he says, confirming violation of the Geneva Conventions. One concern surrounding Guantanamo closure is that detainment may have created terrorists of men who were not. But Boumediene denies feelings of revenge. "I have no problems with the American people. My problem is with Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. I expected more from the great democracy of the U.S., but they failed me and played games with my life."

The remaining detainee, Belkacem, is the only European citizen still in Guantanamo custody. In 2001, the U.S. reportedly tapped his mobile phone conversations with Abu Zabaydah, allegedly an Al-Qaeda operative. In an interview in Bosnia, Anela Belkacem, Bensayah's wife, states they did not have enough money to own a mobile phone. According to Oleskey, "The Bosnian police couldn't even get this number to work." Anela claims her husband "has been sacrificed... No one wants to admit they made a big mistake in detaining these men." The released prisoners face overcoming psychological and physical trauma, reintegrating into society and returning to fragmented lives. Nadja Dizdarevic was an avid supporter of her husband during his internment, but within months of his return, the couple divorced. "We remain good friends. People change in seven years. My children grew up overnight. They didn't watch cartoons, they watched the news." Despite complete exoneration, the men's citizenship is uncertain in some cases, they are blacklisted and claim to be followed by unmarked cars regularly. Boumediene says, "My daughter does not recognize me. I didn't see my wife for seven years. I lost everything. Who will give me these years back?" Currently, Belkacem remains in Guantanamo Bay custody pending his appeal, Boumediene lives in France and Nechle in Algeria. Ait Idr and Boudella are unemployed in Sarajevo, awaiting reinstatement of their citizenship and bank accounts. Bosnia acknowledged to the Council of Europe that it breached the European Convention on Human Rights by participating in extra-judicial extraordinary rendition at the request of the U.S. The Council has accused over 20 countries of collaborating with CIA rendition flights to secret prisons, where torture is know to occur.

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A detainee freed, but not released

NEW YORK, September 23, 2009 — Anybody who thinks it’s going to be easy for the Obama administration to meet its goal of closing the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, detention center by Jan. 22 needs to take a look at the case of Saber Lahmar, who has been imprisoned there since January 2002. Mr. Lahmar is an Algerian who in 2001 was living and working as a permanent resident of Bosnia. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, he was suspected by the U.S. authorities of involvement in a plot to attack the American Embassy in Sarajevo, which led to his arrest by the Bosnian police, his transfer to the U.S. authorities and his incarceration, along with five other suspects from Bosnia, at Guantánamo.

In November 2008, Mr. Lahmar became the first Guantánamo detainee to successfully challenge his detention, bringing a habeas corpus petition to federal court in Washington. According to his lawyer, Robert Kirsch, the U.S. government abandoned its claim that there ever was a plot to attack the embassy in Sarajevo, though it maintained that Mr. Lahmar and the other Bosnians were planning to travel to Afghanistan to fight against U.S. forces there. But Judge Richard Leon, a Bush appointee and no crusader against Guantánamo, ruled that there was no evidence to support the government’s claim, and he ordered the United States to use pursue all efforts to get Mr. Lahmar released from custody.

But despite that ruling, nearly a year after his detention was found to be unjustified, Mr. Lahmar is right where he has been for almost eight years: locked up in Guantánamo. He has not seen his wife for that entire time, nor has he ever seen the child that she gave birth to not long after his arrest. “Relatively speaking,” Mr. Kirsch, his lawyer, said, “his conditions are better than those he had before the court decision, but he’s still suffering horribly emotionally and psychologically.” Ever since Judge Leon’s decision, Mr. Lahmar’s detention has been technically illegal, and one way to deal with it would be to allow him to settle in the United States. But Congress has forbidden any Guantánamo detainees from being settled in the United States.

Moreover, Mr. Lahmar himself, Mr. Kirsch said, isn’t eager to settle in the country that incarcerated him for so long. Instead, the matter has been turned over to the State Department, specifically to Daniel Fried, the special envoy whose job is to facilitate the closing of Guantánamo by persuading other countries to take the detainees who have been ordered released by the courts or determined to pose no danger. Mr. Fried has had some modest success lately — but not in the case of Mr. Lahmar or of a majority of the others ordered released by the courts.

In all, since the Supreme Court decision last year, some 37 habeas petitions have been heard. Thirty have been decided in favor of the detainees, seven against them. Of the 30 ordered released, 20 are still in custody. Lawyers involved in the detainees’ cases say that about 240 men remained locked up in Guantánamo in all, of whom 80 have been approved for resettlement while about 40 have been referred for prosecution. But what sort of prosecution — before civilian or military courts? This basic question has still not been decided, despite the Obama administration’s early and outspoken opposition to the Guantánamo way of doing things.

President Barack Obama suspended ongoing military tribunals when he came into office, but since then his administration has postponed a decision on whether to proceed with some military tribunals or to shift those trials to the civilian courts. According to lawyers involved in some of these cases, the administration’s dilemma is this: If it proceeds with military tribunals, it keeps in place the system of the previous administration, which, during the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama called “an enormous failure.” If it moves to civilian trials, it risks having crucial evidence thrown out because it was obtained by waterboarding and other means of “enhanced interrogation.”

And so, can Guantánamo be emptied and closed in the next four months? “I think it’s likely that most of the men held prisoner there will be gone by then,” Mr. Kirsch said. “It will take tremendous diplomatic effort, but the level of creativity that comes from a deadline should not be underestimated.” Nearly half of the detainees who qualify for release are Yemenis. If Mr. Fried can strike a deal with either Yemen or Saudi Arabia to take them, a large part of the problem could be eliminated at a single stroke.

But not all are Yemenis. Take, for example, the 22 Uighurs, members of the Muslim minority of Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in western China. The men were at one time imprisoned in Guantánamo, and all have since been determined by the courts to pose no danger to the United States. Nine of them have gone to Albania and Bermuda, and four more have agreed to go to the tiny Pacific island nation of Palau — but the nine others are reluctant to go there, said the lawyer for two of the Uighurs, Susan Baker Manning. “What happens to those who don’t accept the offer to go to Palau — and there could be many reasons for not accepting it — I don’t know,” Ms. Manning said. “I’d only be guessing at this point.”

And then what of those who will be prosecuted? And what of those deemed too dangerous to be released but too difficult to prosecute — a category that isn’t much publicly acknowledged, but that lawyers who are involved in the Guantánamo cases believe to exist? One worry of human rights lawyers is that their clients could be taken away from a closed-down Guantánamo and put someplace else outside the jurisdiction of the law. “The last thing we want to see is the opening of a similar facility elsewhere in the world, “ Jameel Jaffer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Security Project, said, “or even in the United States.”

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Guantanamo detainees transferred to three European countries

November 30, 2009 -- The Obama administration transferred four detainees from Guantanamo Bay to three European countries Monday, including an Algerian national who was part of a landmark Supreme Court case on the legal rights of those held at the naval base in Cuba, according to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity. Saber Lahmar, a former legal resident of Bosnia, was expected to land early Tuesday local time in France, which earlier this year also accepted Lakhdar Boumediene, an Algerian who was also first detained in Bosnia. Boumediene lent his name to the 2008 High Court decision in which Guantanamo inmates won the right to challenge their detention in federal court; Lahmar was also a plaintiff in that case. Lahmar was the last of five Algerian Bosnian detainees in the case to be ordered released after a federal judge ruled last year there was insufficient reason to hold the men and said they should be given their freedom "forthwith." Three others were returned to Bosnia, where they were naturalized citizens, but one, Mohamed Nechle, subsequently returned to Algeria.

"We are grateful for the courage and generosity of the French people and government, and for the ongoing effort by President Obama and Ambassador Fried, which will now give Mr. Lahmar a chance to rebuild his life in France," said Robert C. Kirsch, a lawyer at the firm of WilmerHale, which represented Lahmar in federal court. Daniel Fried is the administration's special envoy on detainee issues.

Also Monday, the administration transferred two Tunisians to Italy, where they are expected to face prosecution on terrorism charges, according to an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity. The names of the Tunisians could not be immediately confirmed. The administration also transferred a Palestinian detainee, whose name could not be confirmed, to Hungary.

There are now 211 detainees remaining at the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, of whom approximately 90 have been cleared for repatriation or resettlement in a third country. Seven European countries have now accepted detainees from Guantanamo Bay and more are expected to follow, according to U.S. and European officials.

The five Algerian-Bosnians were seized by U.S. troops in Sarajevo in early 2002, despite a local court ruling that there was insufficient evidence implicating them in a plot to blow up the U.S. Embassy in the Bosnian capital. Lahmar, who was working in Bosnia for a Saudi charity, was married to a Bosnian whose father was a janitor at the U.S. Embassy. His wife was pregnant at the time of his detention and he has never seen his daughter. Both remain in Bosnia.

Last year, the Justice Department withdrew the allegation that the men were involved in a bombing conspiracy, but continued to insist that they planned to travel to Afghanistan to attack U.S. forces. In November of last year, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon said the evidence against the men came from one unnamed source in a classified document, and he urged the government to "end this process." Leon, however, upheld the continued detention of a sixth Algerian and former Bosnian citizen, Belkacem Bensayah. U.S. officials said Bensayah had regular contact with senior military aides to Osama bin Laden and logged dozens of phone calls to Afghanistan after Sept.ember11, 2001, and before his arrest by Bosnian authorities in 2001. Bensayah has appealed Leon's decision.

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Algerian Guantanamo detainee transferred to France

PARIS, December 1, 2009 (Reuters) - An Algerian man who had been detained at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo in Cuba since 2002 has been transferred to France, the French Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday. The ministry named the man as Saber Lahmar and said he had been cleared of all terrorism charges by courts of justice in several countries including the United States.