Five Guantanamo Bay inmates released to the United Arab Emirates
(Russia chose a different tack)
Five men who have been held for more than 13 years at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been released and sent to the United Arab Emirates, the Pentagon said on Sunday.
The five Yemeni men were accepted for resettlement in the Persian Gulf nation after U.S. authorities determined they no longer posed a threat, the Defense Department said in a statement. Their release brings the Guantanamo prison population to 107.
The men, who arrived in the UAE on Saturday, were identified as Ali Ahmad Muhammad al-Razihi, Khalid Abd-al-Jabbar Muhammad Uthman al-Qadasi, Adil Said al-Hajj Ubayd al-Busays, Sulayman Awad Bin Uqayl al-Nahdi, and Fahmi Salem Said al-Asani.
Remaining: The Pentagon said 107 detainees remained at the Guantanamo prison
All were arrested fleeing the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan following the September 11, 2001, terror attacks and were described as low-level fighters in American military assessments.
(Weren't Lerner and Koskinen described as 'low-level')
None of them had been charged with a crime but had been detained as enemy combatants. They could not be sent to their homeland because the U.S. considers Yemen too unstable to accept prisoners from Guantanamo amid an ongoing Saudi-led war against Shiite rebels there.
Officials in the United Arab Emirates did not immediately comment Monday on the men's resettlement, nor was there any word about their arrival in the UAE's state-run media.
In July 2008, the seven-emirate nation accepted an unidentified Guantanamo detainee at the same time that Afghanistan and Qatar each accepted one.
The United Arab Emirates is a major regional military ally for the U.S. The country is also part of its coalition targeting the Islamic State group with airstrikes in Iraq and Syria.
President Barack Obama has reduced the number of prisoners at Guantanamo by more than half since he took office.
When he said he was going to close it down no one suspected it would be by letting them go. There are only two things at play here.
1. He lives in fantasy land believing closing down Gitmo is going to somehow stop terrorists attacks.
2. He is helping the enemy because he is the enemy. e.g.
The Iran deal and now his insistence we take in Syrian refugees despite what just happened in Paris. The proof is in the pudding.
"The Audacity of Hope" [pg. 261]:
Of course, not all my conversations in immigrant communities follow this easy pattern. In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific assurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.
And he is sure as hell is fulfilling that promise.
Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim misfit who looked to Rev Wright to wash clean his Muslim past to make him "electable"... and it came back to bite him on the ass. And yes folks he presented himself as a Muslim foreign exchange student which is the reason his college transcripts are sealed.
He had sought to close the detention center but faced opposition from Congress. The administration is now seeking to move detainees to the United States amid intense opposition.
The Pentagon said 107 detainees remained at the Guantanamo prison for suspected foreign militants.
The Defense Department is expected soon to unveil a long-awaited plan outlining how it would close the detention center at Guantanamo despite fierce resistance to shutting down the facility in Congress.
