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GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba – The US military returned a prisoner to Algeria on Thursday who had been held at Guantánamo without charge for more than two decades, as the Biden administration continued efforts to reduce the prisoner population at the Navy base.
The detainee, Said bin Brahim bin Umran Bakush, 52, was among 20 suspected low-level fighters swept up by Pakistani security services in a 2002 raid in Faisalabad on homes believed to be Al Qaeda safe houses. The suspected fighters were eventually taken to Guantanamo Bay.
The release leaves only one prisoner captured in the ongoing raid at a Pentagon prison in Cuba. The rest have been transferred or returned.
Lawyers who have tried to speak to Mr. Bakush describe him as reclusive. He boycotted hearings suitable for his release under review and usually lived in a cell in Camp 6, a prison building where cooperative prisoners were kept and allowed to eat, pray and watch television together.
H. Candace Gorman, a Chicago-based defense attorney who has represented Mr. Bakush for the past 17 years, said she stopped seeing him in 2017 or 2018.
He has never been married and has no children, but may have family far away in Algeria, he said in an email. This year marks the 22nd Ramadan in US custody.
US forces initially identified the detainee as a Libyan named Ali Abdul Razzaq, and that name appeared in federal court filings. But in time, he identified himself as Said bin Brahim bin Umran Bakush and said he was Algerian.
At the time of the 2021 hearing, US intelligence agencies concluded that he “probably participated in basic and advanced training in Afghanistan and then became an instructor in an extremist camp before his capture.”
A US military officer represented the interests of Mr. Bakush who said “he prefers to be alone and spends a lot of time in his cell,” adding that he has little education and the desire to buy a truck and become a delivery driver.
In 2018, lawyers tried to use the case to get federal courts to set higher standards for evaluating the intelligence gathered against them in the early days of Guantánamo Bay. But the attempt failed.
He also said that, as prisoners approach twenty years of detention, the US government should be required to prove the prisoner’s future dangerousness in the same way as civil commitment for psychiatric reasons. The Supreme Court declined to take up the case in 2021.
Mr. Bakush’s release was the sixth transfer in six months by the Biden administration, which in a statement described each release as consistent with its goal of “responsibly reducing the detainee population and ultimately closing the Guantánamo Bay facility.”
Currently, 16 of the 30 people detained there are eligible to move, but that would require more complicated diplomatic negotiations than a new repatriation. They include 11 Yemenis, Libyans and Somalis who, according to the law, cannot return to their homeland. Negotiations to find a country to take some of these people back to the Obama administration.
In addition, the lawyer for the admitted war criminal, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, is looking for the country to take him in as part of a plea deal that will provide him with medical treatment. Mr. Hadi, who is in his 60s, is disabled by a degenerative spinal disease and has undergone six back and neck surgeries at Guantánamo Bay since 2017. Over the years, 780 men and boys have been detained at Guantánamo Bay, with maximum population. about 660 in 2003. All of them were brought in under the administration of George W. Bush.
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