Who Are the Gitmo Prisoners Released With Sami al-Haj?

Late last Thursday evening, I joined in the widespread celebrations -- at least in those parts of the world that care about the injustice of holding people in prison without charge or trial -- that attended the repatriation of al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj from Guantánamo, his home for the last six years, to Sudan.

Although a few news outlets have briefly mentioned some of the other men released with Sami -- two of his compatriots, a Moroccan and five Afghans -- their stories remain largely unknown. However, as a result of the research I undertook for my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, I'm able to shine some light on their stories, which otherwise are unlikely to receive much coverage -- if at all -- outside their home countries.

While none have the extraordinary impact of Sami's story -- which, I note, has the Pentagon so scared that three officials told ABC News on Friday that he was "a manipulator and a propagandist," who produced a "constant drumbeat of allegations" about the treatment of prisoners in Guantánamo -- they do nothing to support the administration’s constantly unraveling claim that the prisoners are "the worst of the worst." This claim, made by Rear Admiral John D. Stufflebeem on January 28, 2002, has been parroted at the highest levels of government in the years since, even though 501 prisoners have now been released, and the administration has stated that it only intends to try between 60 to 80 of the 273 prisoners who remain in Guantánamo.

On the cargo plane containing Sami al-Haj that landed in Khartoum in the early hours of May 2 were Amir Yacoub al-Amir and Walid Ali, who, like Sami, were bound like beasts for their journey despite finally being transported to freedom. Both had also been held for over six years without charge or trial, but unlike Sami, whose plight was widely publicized by al-Jazeera, by his lawyers at the legal action charity Reprieve, and by groups campaigning for the rights of journalists, including the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Sans Frontières, both of these men had barely registered on the media’s radar.

Amir Yacoub al-Amir, great-grandson of Sudans Caliph

36-year old Amir Yacoub al-Amir was one of at least 120 prisoners (around 15 percent of Guantánamo's entire population), who were captured not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, without ever having been anywhere near the battlefields of Afghanistan. In his tribunal at Guantánamo (one of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals convened in 2004 and 2005 to assess whether, on capture, the prisoners had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants” without rights), al-Amir strenuously denied an allegation that he was associated with al-Qaeda, saying, "I disagree with al-Qaeda on everything," and also denied being associated with the Taliban.

Seized from a car in Peshawar in March 2002, while visiting Pakistan, al-Amir’s story echoes reports by numerous other innocent men seized in Pakistan, who said that they were captured and sold for money, a situation that was confirmed at the highest levels in 2006, when, in his autobiography, President Musharraf boasted that in return for handing over 369 terror suspects (who were mostly transferred to Guantánamo), "We have earned bounty payments totaling millions of dollars." In Guantánamo, al-Amir explained that he was seized because the Pakistani government "was capturing any Arab and giving them to the United States as terrorists."

Like Sami al-Haj, al-Amir was represented by Reprieve, and in 2007 Reprieve’s Director, Clive Stafford Smith, traveled to Sudan to meet his family, where he discovered that his great-grandfather, a cousin of the Khalifa (Caliph), had, with numerous other relatives, been captured and imprisoned by the British army, after the fall of General Gordon's regime in 1885, in conditions that were remarkable similar to those prevailing at Guantánamo. In an article in the New Statesman, Stafford Smith described how the prisoners were "dispatched (or, in modern terms, rendered)" to Egypt, where conditions were so brutal that al-Amir’s great-grandfather died, and noted that, during his visit, members of the government, and other relatives of the Khalifa, "expressed concern that Amir Yacoub had been illegally rendered, and was now being held, like his great-grandfather, by the hyperpower of the day, in a brutal and lawless prison far from home."