The Shocking Stories of the Sudanese Humanitarian Aid Workers Just Released From Guantánamo

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http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/



Adel Hassan Hamad and Salim Muhood Adem, after their release. Photo © Mohamed Nureldin Abdalla, Reuters.


Two years after being cleared for release from Guantánamo by a military review board, Adel Hassan Hamad, a Sudanese hospital administrator who worked for a Saudi charity, and Salim Muhood Adem, who worked with orphans for a Kuwaiti NGO, have been repatriated to the country of their birth, where, as lawyer Clive Stafford Smith explained, they are both “safe with their families.”

After arriving at Khartoum airport, they were presented with traditional Sudanese clothes by intelligence officers, who took them to a hospital for a short medical examination before returning them to their families and friends. As a noisy celebration got underway, Adel Hamad spoke by phone to his American lawyers, Steve Wax and William Teesdale of the Federal Public Defender’s office in Oregon. “I thank God almighty and express my gratefulness to you,” he said. “I can finally see the light after the darkness.”

If the administration was hoping to lie low for a while, and weather the recent torrent of criticism over its post-9/11 detention policies – in the Supreme Court, in connection with the destruction of CIA videotapes chronicling the torture of detainees, and through its generally inept attempts to pursue war crimes trials at Guantánamo itself – the release of these men will provide no comfort whatsoever, as their stories highlight some of the most egregious flaws in the whole of Guantánamo’s sordid history.

Adel Hamad, who is now 49 years old, had been living in Pakistan and working for charity organizations for 17 years. Captured at his home in July 2002, after returning from a holiday in Sudan with his wife and four children, he refuted an allegation that he had any kind of connection to al-Qaeda, telling his tribunal in Guantánamo, “I hate them and I pray to God not to let people among the Muslims carry their ideas.” He also pointed out, “If I was a member in al-Qaeda or if I had an association with them I would’ve not travelled in June 2002 to Sudan with my family on an annual vacation and after the vacation ended I voluntarily returned to Pakistan. If I was a criminal, with association to those criminals, why would I return to Pakistan knowing that Pakistani intelligence was arresting al-Qaeda members?”







DEAD BECAUSE OF A LIE