Around 270 detainees are held in Guantanamo Bay, more than a third of them are Yemenis, and the failure to reach an agreement between the US and Yemen in this issue remains a mystery, said David H. Remes, an American lawyer who along with his colleague Marc Falkoff represent 15 Yemeni detainees in Guantanamo.
Remes arrived in Yemen last week on his seventh visit to the country, to meet with Yemeni officials and promote the cause of Yemeni detainees in Guantanamo as well as to meet with his clients’ families. Remes, in an exclusive interview with the Yemen Observer, explained that their frustration – his and his colleagues who represent Guantanamo prisoners – is that all sides claim a moral high-ground.
The US says that it does not want to be the world’s jailer. However, the US has to ensure that when they return home that they will not become a threat again. This is what the US says is their main concern. He also said that the Yemenis want their men back but the US imposes intolerable conditions such as imprisoning the men in Yemeni jails upon their return, on dubious grounds. The US wants Yemen to monitor them, re-educate them, rehabilitee them and make them renounce their ways.
Remes thinks this is mostly unnecessary, and that most of the prisoners have no need of re-educated because they were never extremists in the first place.
He has met tehm and knows their families. “Even the American officials have said that they have got the wrong men, half of the men do not belong here and are only the foot soldiers,” explained Remes.
Talking about the politics of the US leadership, Remes reckons the Bush administration has been a disaster for the American people and for the people of the Middle East due to its practice of endless guilt by association, which is the reason why most of the men are held there. US forces only captured 12 percent of the men in Guantanamo – the majority was picked up by Afghan bounty hunters and Pakistani border guards and the US claims against these men are based on what these bounty hunters and border guards said. So the US has little direct, concrete intelligence about the activities of these men, says Remes.
The problem, he suggests, is that “The US was literally pouring money into Afghanistan, millions and millions of dollars in cash. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was driving around with the cash in the back of their trucks. Any Afghani can get at least five thousand dollars if he says that that man is a terrorist, or that other was with al-Qaeda, or that man was in a guest house that was run by the Taliban. So the United States picked these men up indiscriminately like fish caught in a net,” reported Remes.
President Saleh met last April the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Robert Muller, who was in a visit to Yemen, thus renewing Yemen’s demand to the US to release the Yemeni detainees in Guantanamo.
Earlier last month the Yemeni Government prepared a program to rehabilitate 92 of its citizens who are still detained in Guantanamo and handed a copy of the program to the US Government through the American Ambassador who left Sana’a to brief his government on such procedures.
The program aims to convince the returnees to renounce violence and extremism through reintegrating them into society and the returnees will be compensated by the government, sources said.
A coordination plan between the Ministries of Education, Information, and Islamic Affairs and Guidance will be drawn and will re-qualify the detainees, for their own benefit and for their nation’s, the sources added.
The US administration always says it wants only guarantees from Yemen and other countries that the men will not pursue violence again, and that that they will be treated well.
The policy that the US used in Guantanamo remains vague and whether the US is planning to close it down as declared by Bush remains to be seen. A recent article published in the Guardian newspaper on June 2, 2008, talked about a report accusing the US of holding terror suspects on prison ships, according to human rights lawyers, who also claim there has been an attempt to hide the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.
Remes represent 16 Yemeni prisoners from Yemen: Faruq Ali Ahmed; Salman Yahya Hassan Mohammed Rabeii; Abdulsalam Ali Abdulrahman Al-Hela. From Dahmar Jamal Muhammad ‘Alawi Mar’i; from Ibb Yasin Qasem Muhammad; Saeed Mohammed Saleh Hatim; Abd al-Malik Abd al-Wahab; from Taiz: Mohammed Nasser Yahia Abdullah Khussrof; Mohammed Mohammed Hassen; Muktar Yahya Najee al-Warafi; Allal Ab al-Jallil Abd al-Rahman Abd; Mahmoud Abd al-Aziz Abd al-Mujahid and finally from Aden :Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman; Adil Said al-Haj Obeid al-Busayss and Majid Mahmud Abdu Ahmad