GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — The Biden administration on Monday repatriated to Saudi Arabia for mental health care a prisoner who had been tortured so severely by U.S. interrogators that he was declared ineligible to stand trial as the 20th suspected hijacker in the terrorist attacks. 11 of September. .
The prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtaniin his 40s, he is the second to be transferred from the war prison under the administration.
a government panel recommended recently that Mr. Qahtani, who had spent 20 years in Guantánamo Bay, was released after a Navy doctor reported that he was too incapacitated to pose a future threat, especially if he was sent to a care facility inpatient mental. Last year, the doctor confirmed an independent psychiatrist’s finding that Mr. Qahtani suffered from schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder and could not receive adequate care in the US military prison.
His longtime attorney, Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said the transfer had been long overdue.
“For 14 years I have sat across from Mohammed as he talks to non-existent people in the room and makes eye contact with the walls, something that has been a constant part of his life since his teens,” Kadidal said. “It’s an extraordinary relief that the next time the voices in his head tell him to swallow a mouthful of broken glass, he’ll be in a psychiatric facility, not a prison.”
Mr. Qahtani’s case was controversial to the end. three Republican senators asked the president last week in a letter to stop all transfers from Guantánamo and, in particular, to keep Mr. Qahtani in prison. “We are concerned that he may attempt to resume terrorist activity once he is released from US custody,” Senators James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, Jim Risch of Idaho and Marco Rubio of Florida wrote.
The US military airlifted Qahtani from remote Guantánamo on Sunday, shortly after the 30-day notice required by Congress for detainee transfers ran out. In an unusual move, the Saudi government did not send its own plane to retrieve him, delaying the announcement of his release until the US military transfer operation was completed.
Qahtani’s notoriety is linked to his attempt to enter the United States on August 4, 2001, when he was turned away by an immigration inspector at the airport in Orlando, Florida. US authorities later discovered that he was to meet Mohamed Atta there, the ringleader of attacks that carried out 19 hijackers and killed nearly 3,000 people in four near-simultaneous kidnappings the following month.
Mr. Qahtani found his way to Afghanistan and was captured along the Pakistani border in late 2001. At Guantanamo, the US military isolated him naked, disoriented and sleepless in a log cabin at Camp X-Ray in late 2002 and early 2003, and interrogated him brutally and relentlessly. A senior Bush administration official later concluded that the torture made him ineligible to stand trial. His lawyers later revealed that he had suffered a traumatic brain injury as a young man in Saudi Arabia and was later diagnosed with schizophrenia there, circumstances that might also have made him ineligible to stand trial.
Transfer follows repatriation in july a moroccan manAbdul Latif Nasser, whose release was mostly arranged in the declining days of the Obama administration, but the Trump administration never acted on it.
in a statement announcing the release of Mr. Qahtani from Guantanamo, the Pentagon thanked Saudi Arabia and other partner nations for supporting US efforts to reduce the prison population with the goal of ultimately closing the facility.
“After two decades of indefinite detention, Mr. Qahtani finally has a chance to recover from the torture he endured, receive mental health care that Guantánamo cannot provide, and hopefully someday get his life back,” said Scott Roehm. , Washington director of the Center for Victims Against Torture. “His transfer of him is a welcome incremental step, but the Biden administration needs to act much faster and more comprehensively to close Guantanamo than he has done so far.”
The transfer left 38 detainees at Guantánamo, half of them approved for release if the State Department reaches security agreements with host countries that satisfy the Secretary of Defense. Of the remainder, 12 have been charged with war crimes, including two men who have been convicted.
The other seven are being held as “law of war” prisoners, essentially being held indefinitely because the United States deems them too dangerous to release. Their cases are periodically reviewed by a US government panel, which may recommend a transfer with certain security measures, including travel restrictions or detention in prisons abroad.
