The Pentagon announced Monday that it released a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay into Saudi Arabian custody, bringing the total number of individuals left at the military prison camp to 103.
The transfer of Muhammed Abd Al Rahman Awn Al-Shamrani, who was sent to Guantanamo in 2002, was cleared by the president’s Periodic Review Board in September 2015.
The panel determined that the ongoing detention of the Saudi national “does not remain necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.” He was never charged by US officials with any crime.
The Periodic Review Board’s analysis of Al-Shamrani ran counter to a previous evaluation of the detainee performed by DOD’s Guantanamo Joint Task Force in 2008. That assessment declared that the Saudi national would “immediately seek out prior associations and reengage in hostilities and extremist support activities at home and abroad.”
Its authors also claimed that Al-Shamrani had “threated the guard staff, has preached extremist ideology to other detainees, and has indicated his intent to kill Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan if released, according to records released by Wikileaks.
News of his transfer comes exactly fourteen years after the first round of “war on terror” detainees arrived at the prison in January 2002.
On Sunday, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough promised that the facility would indeed by shuttered by the time President Obama leaves office.
“He feels an obligation to his successor to close that, and that’s why we’re going to do it,” McDonough said on Fox News, stating that final plan to close Guantanamo will soon be presented to Congress.
In the press release announcing Al-Shamrani’s transfer, the Pentagon thanked the government of Saudi Arabia for “its willingness to support ongoing US efforts” to close Gitmo.
