WASHINGTON — The case of a mentally ailing detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Mohammed al-Qahtani, has lengthy confounded the US authorities. Suspected of being Al Qaeda’s supposed twentieth hijacker within the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults, he was tortured by navy interrogators early in his detention on the American naval base in Cuba.
A senior Pentagon official later decided that, due to how Mr. Qahtani was initially handled, he couldn’t be prosecuted. Safety officers additionally thought of him too harmful to launch, so he has remained detained for 20 years.
On Friday, the Pentagon stated {that a} parole-like board had really helpful repatriating Mr. Qahtani to Saudi Arabia to a custodial rehabilitation and psychological well being care program for extremists. The Biden administration is anticipated to ship him there as early as March.
The transfer adopted a report final spring by a Navy physician who concluded that Mr. Qahtani, who’s in his 40s, ought to be transferred as a result of he couldn’t obtain the medical therapy he wanted at Guantánamo and was too impaired to pose a future menace — particularly if he was despatched to inpatient psychological care, in keeping with folks briefed on that report.
In June, the Periodic Evaluation Board, a six-agency panel that critiques the instances of uncharged Guantánamo prisoners, unanimously adopted that advice, in keeping with officers. However the Biden administration, apparently whereas it negotiated a safety settlement with Saudi Arabia for Mr. Qahtani’s repatriation, held off on making the choice public till Friday.
“The board acknowledges the detainee presents some stage of menace in mild of his previous actions and associations,” the panel stated, explaining why it believed that menace could possibly be “adequately mitigated,” making his continued indefinite detention pointless.
Amongst them, it cited Mr. Qahtani’s “considerably compromised psychological well being situation.” It additionally cited his “out there household assist” and Saudi Arabia’s capability to offer “complete psychological well being care,” in addition to its capability to observe him and limit his journey if he completes therapy.
Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer for Mr. Qahtani and a legislation professor on the Metropolis College of New York, referred to as the choice to advocate his consumer’s switch “lengthy overdue.” He cited his consumer’s critical psychological sickness, together with repeated current suicide makes an attempt.
“Regardless of the severity of his sickness, Mohammed doesn’t pose a threat to anybody however himself,” Mr. Kassem stated. “He wants psychiatric therapy in Saudi Arabia, not continued incarceration in Cuba.”
Mr. Qahtani is one among 39 detainees left on the wartime jail, and is one among 19 who’ve been really helpful for switch topic to safety preparations. By legislation, Protection Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III should inform Congress 30 days earlier than any such switch that he’s happy with the settlement.
However most of these 19 detainees can’t be despatched residence as a result of they arrive from unstable international locations like Yemen and Somalia, which by legislation can not obtain Guantánamo detainees. So the Biden administration should discover different international locations keen to take them. As a result of Mr. Qahtani may be repatriated, he could possibly be the primary to go away.
Mr. Qahtani’s notoriety is linked to his try to enter the US on Aug. 4, 2001, when an immigration inspector on the Orlando airport turned him away. The authorities later found that Mohamed Atta — a ringleader of the assault carried out by 19 hijackers that killed almost 3,000 folks the subsequent month — had come to fulfill him there.
The circumstances led the authorities to imagine that Al Qaeda had despatched Mr. Qahtani to function a member of the staff that hijacked United Airways Flight 93. Passengers on the flight fought again and triggered the airplane to crash right into a Pennsylvania area slightly than its doubtless supposed goal, the U.S. Capitol.
(Mr. Qahtani has by no means been tried or convicted of being a part of that conspiracy. Even when he had been, it’s not clear whether or not Mr. Qahtani, who sustained a traumatic mind harm as a youth and was identified with schizophrenia earlier than he tried to enter the US, had any particular information of what the federal government suspects Mr. Atta was planning for him.)
By the point the US invaded Afghanistan in response to the Sept. 11 assaults, Mr. Qahtani had drifted into jihadi circles and was captured alongside the Pakistani frontier in December 2001 with a gaggle of overseas fighters. He and people believed to be bodyguards to Osama bin Laden had been despatched to Guantánamo in early 2002.
Later that 12 months, the U.S. navy acknowledged that he is perhaps no unusual detainee. With authorization from Protection Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, he was compelled to endure two months of steady, brutal interrogation by the U.S. navy inside a wood hut at Camp X-Ray in late 2002 and early 2003.
Hour-by-hour logs leaked to Time journal confirmed navy interrogators positioned Mr. Qahtani in solitary confinement, stripped him bare, forcibly shaved him, and subjected him to extended sleep deprivation, dehydration, publicity to chilly, and varied psychological and sexual humiliations like making him bark like a canine, dance with a person and put on ladies’s underwear on his head. They extracted a confession, which he later recanted.
Mr. Qahtani’s therapy was so degrading and abusive that the Bush administration official overseeing navy commissions, Susan J. Crawford, concluded in 2008 that he couldn’t be prosecuted. As a result of “we tortured” him, she advised The Washington Submit that 12 months, she refused to authorize his capital prosecution with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the assaults, and 4 different detainees accused of aiding them.
Mr. Mohammed and the 4 different males — whose case on the navy commissions system has been in pretrial hearings for almost a decade — had been additionally tortured in American custody. However that occurred within the abroad prisons of the C.I.A., with graphic descriptions rising years after Ms. Crawford’s resolution about Mr. Qahtani. Their torture by the C.I.A. has been a significant challenge in that case.
As early as 2009, then Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. acknowledged the conundrum surrounding Mr. Qahtani. “We’re inheriting a really troublesome scenario,” he stated days earlier than assuming workplace. “Not all of it’s clear minimize.”
As vp, former administration officers recall, Mr. Biden was devoted to President Barack Obama’s dedication to ending detention operations at Guantánamo, together with personally asking overseas leaders to assist resettle detainees who couldn’t go residence. Whereas Congress enacted a legislation that thwarted Mr. Obama’s plan to shut the jail by transferring some detainees to a special facility in the US, the administration nonetheless managed to vastly winnow down the variety of prisoners there.
The one detainee to go away the jail underneath President Donald J. Trump was additionally transferred to detention in Saudi Arabia. A 12 months into Mr. Biden’s presidency, his administration has transferred only one extra out. Mr. Biden has described closing the power as a coverage purpose, however he has not pushed Congress to rescind the legislation that stops bringing any detainees to high-security prisons on home soil or appointed a particular envoy to barter switch offers, because the Obama administration had.
Mr. Qahtani’s approval for repatriation follows litigation by his protection attorneys, Mr. Kassem and Shayana Kadidal of the Middle for Constitutional Rights. They’ve argued that he deserves to be launched to Saudi Arabia on medical grounds underneath each the Geneva Conventions and a U.S. Military regulation.
His attorneys enlisted a psychiatrist who treats U.S. navy veterans for post-traumatic stress, Emily Keram, to judge Mr. Qahtani over time, beginning in 2015. Dr. Keram additionally scrutinized his data from Saudi Arabia exhibiting that he had undergone an acute psychotic break there attributed to schizophrenia lengthy earlier than he arrived at Guantánamo.
The torture solely made him sicker, the psychiatrist wrote in a sequence of experiences to the courtroom, and Mr. Qahtani distrusts American navy well being suppliers, probably as a result of navy medics had been used at his interrogations. He refused psychotropic treatment and lately repeatedly tried to kill himself, together with by hanging, slicing and swallowing damaged glass, courtroom paperwork present.
In 2020, primarily based on Dr. Keram’s work, a federal decide ordered an impartial examination by a three-doctor panel, two of them foreigners. The Trump Justice Division resisted that order, which might have been the primary overseas medical intervention on the wartime jail.
As a substitute, Congress created a place of a Navy physician who could be assigned to the bottom however who would work independently. Mr. Qahtani’s attorneys agreed to place off resolving the courtroom case whereas that official scrutinized the navy’s medical data and Dr. Keram’s findings. The federal government has a deadline on Monday to inform the courtroom its place on the decide’s order requiring an impartial examination.
In Could, the Navy physician, Corry J. Kucik, concurred with Dr. Keram’s findings, in keeping with folks acquainted with a seven-page report he ready for the Periodic Evaluation Board.
Dr. Kucik agreed that Mr. Qahtani was broken by his childhood mind harm and the schizophrenia he developed as an adolescent, and that his abusive interrogation and subsequent continued confinement had solely aggravated that.
Dr. Kucik, the folks stated, additionally agreed that Mr. Qahtani couldn’t be adequately handled at Guantánamo, and that he was extraordinarily unlikely to pose any menace if despatched to a Saudi psychological hospital close to his household the place his psychological well being could possibly be extra successfully addressed.