Gitmo is three detainees lighter today with more to pack off for the sunny skies of Palau this week. Jake Tapper has the run down of who shipped out this week here. Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, a native of Yemen, was returned to his home country where he was welcomed "with enthusiasm" and two others have gone to Ireland.Ali Ahmed says he was never, ever in Afghanistan but the U.S. government says he "was associated with Al-Qaeda. He was present on the front lines in Bagram, Afghanistan. He was identified by a senior Al-Qaeda facilitator as having been a resident at a safehouse in Kandahar, Afghanistan in 2000 (his individual also saw the detainee at a safehouse located in Faisalabad, Pakistan in February 2002 with a group of Yemenis who had fled Afghanistan). Finally, the Detainee was identified by another individual, a senior Al-Qaeda operational planner, as having resided at a safehouse located in Kandahar in 2001."
Al Ahmed's statement is here. He claims he was in Pakistan the whole time smoking hashish and hanging out with a bunch of university students while trying to gain Pakistani citizenship and looking for work.
As for the other two, Team Obama didn't name them at the request of the Irish government but Tapper reports that "Amnesty International has been lobbying Ireland to accept Uzbek national Oybek Jamoldinivich Jabbarov, and another Uzbekh. " Tapper has their details here.
The New York Times has this list of countries that have accepted detainees - there are about 40 of them; not all of those transfers were under Team Obama, of course.
There are still over 220 in residence at Club Gitmo and Obama is already backpeddling on his January deadline for closure. It's a little harder than he thought and, as reported last week, the Bush administration os partly to blame for that because they left such messy files and kept such poor records.
And so, as Iran builds more nukes and test fires missiles, as Venezuela seeks more uranium, as terror threats are being thwarted all over the United States, do we feel safer now than we did a year ago?
(H/T: Memeorandum)
