The case of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a detainee at Guantánamo with a mental disorder, has long been a problem the US government has failed to resolve. Suspected of being the 20th al Qaeda hijacker in the September 11, 2001 attacks, he was tortured by military interrogators in the early stages of his detention at the US naval base in Cuba.
A senior Pentagon official later ruled that he could not stand trial due to the initial treatment he had received. The security authorities felt that releasing him would be too dangerous. Thus, he has remained in detention for two decades.
On Friday, the Pentagon announced that, on the recommendation of a judicial council, Qahtani must be repatriated to Saudi Arabia to enter a mental health and rehabilitation program for extremists. The Biden administration is expected to send him there in March.
The decision came after an opinion issued in the northern hemisphere’s spring by a doctor concluding that Qahtani, who is in his 40s, should be transferred because he cannot receive the medical treatment he needs at Guantánamo and is too mentally affected to pose a future threat — especially if you are hospitalized, according to people with knowledge of the opinion.
Last June, the Periodic Review Board, which brings together six agencies and reviews the cases of Guantánamo detainees who have not been formally indicted, is said to have unanimously endorsed the decision. But, apparently, while negotiating with Saudi Arabia a security agreement for the repatriation of Qahtani, the Biden administration postponed until last Friday the moment of disclosing the decision.
“The board recognizes that the detainee poses some level of threat in view of his past activities and associations,” the committee said, explaining why it felt that this risk could be “adequately mitigated”, which would make his continued indefinite detention unnecessary. .
The committee cited, among other points, Qahtani’s “significantly compromised mental condition”. It also noted that he will have family support in Saudi Arabia and that the country is able to offer him “comprehensive mental health care” and also to monitor him and restrict his travels if he completes treatment.
Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer for Qahtani and a professor of law at the City University of New York, said the decision to recommend his client’s transfer should have been made a long time ago. He cited his client’s severe mental disorder and his recent repeated suicide attempts.
“Despite the severity of his disorder, Mohammed does not pose a risk to anyone but himself,” the lawyer said. “He needs psychiatric care in Saudi Arabia, not to remain incarcerated in Cuba.”
Qahtani is one of 39 detainees still remaining at Guantánamo prison and one of 19 who have been recommended for transfer subject to security measures. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is required by law to inform Congress 30 days before any transfer that he is satisfied with the agreement.
But most of those 19 detainees cannot be sent home because they come from unstable countries such as Yemen and Somalia, which are not allowed by law to receive detainees from Guantánamo. So the Biden administration needs to find other countries willing to welcome them. As Qahtani can be repatriated, he could be the first to leave.
His notoriety is due to his attempt to enter the United States on August 4, 2001, when an immigration inspector at Orlando airport barred him. Authorities later discovered that Mohamed Atta — one of the leaders of the attack launched by 19 hijackers and which in the following month left nearly 3,000 dead — had gone to Orlando to meet Qahtani.
This fact led authorities to conclude that Al Qaeda sent Qahtani to be a member of the team that hijacked United Airlines Flight 93. Passengers on that flight resisted the hijackers and caused the plane to crash into a Pennsylvania field instead of its likely intended target, the US Capitol.
Qahtani was never tried or convicted for participating in this conspiracy. Even if he had been, it’s unclear whether he, who suffered traumatic brain injury as a child and was diagnosed as schizophrenic before trying to enter the US, had any specific knowledge of the plans Atta would have had for him.
When the United States invaded Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 attacks, Qahtani had begun to frequent jihadist circles. He was captured in December 2001 with a group of foreign fighters on the Pakistani border. He and fighters believed to have been Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards were taken to Guantánamo in early 2002.
Later that year, US military forces admitted that Qahtani might not have been a detainee with the others. With the authorization of then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he was subjected to two months of continuous and brutal interrogation by US forces inside a wooden shack at Camp X-Ray in late 2002 and early 2003.
Leaked reports to Time magazine detailing the hourly interrogations revealed that military interrogators put Qahtani in solitary confinement, stripped him naked, forcibly shaved his beard and subjected him to prolonged sleep deprivation, dehydration, exposure to the cold and various psychological humiliations. and sexual, like making him bark like a dog, dance with a man, and wear women’s underwear on his head. Interrogators wrung out a confession, which he later repudiated.
The treatment Qahtani was subjected to was so abusive and degrading that Bush administration officer in charge of military commissions, Susan J. Crawford, concluded in 2008 that he could not stand trial. Because “we tortured him,” she told the Washington Post that year, she refused to allow him to stand trial alongside Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-declared mastermind of the attacks, and four other detainees accused of aiding him.
Mohammed and the four others – whose case in the military commission system has been in pre-trial hearings for nearly a decade – were also tortured in US custody. But this was done in CIA prisons in third countries, and explicit descriptions only surfaced years after Crawford’s decision on Qahtani. The torture they were subjected to by the CIA has been a big problem in their processes.
As late as 2009, then vice president-elect Joe Biden acknowledged the impasse over Qahtani. “We are inheriting a very complicated situation,” he said days before taking up his post. “It’s not all clear and clean.”
Former administration officials recall that, as deputy, Biden fully supported President Barack Obama’s pledge to end detention operations at Guantánamo, which included personally asking leaders of other countries to help resettle detainees who could not be sent from return to their countries of origin. Congress passed a law that thwarted Obama’s plan to transfer some of the inmates to a different prison on American soil, but the administration was nonetheless able to greatly reduce the number of inmates incarcerated at the base.
The only detainee to leave Guantanamo during Donald Trump’s administration was also transferred to Saudi Arabia to be incarcerated there. Today, one year after the start of Biden’s presidency, his administration has transferred just one more. Biden says closing the prison at Guantánamo is one of his goals, but he has not pressed Congress to rescind the law that prevents any detainees from being brought to high-security prisons on US soil, nor has he appointed a special envoy to negotiate agreements. transfer, as the Obama administration did.
Qahtani’s repatriation was approved following contentious actions by his defense attorneys, Ramzi Kassem and Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights. They argue that the detainee deserves to be handed over to Saudi Arabia on medical grounds, as provided for in the Geneva Convention and a US Army regulation.
Lawyers have hired a psychiatrist who treats US military veterans with PTSD, Emily Keram, to evaluate Qahtani over the years, starting in 2015. Keram obtained Qahtani’s medical record from Saudi Arabia, showing that it was a long time before he came to Guantanamo he had already suffered an acute psychotic break attributed to schizophrenia.
The torture would have only worsened his condition, the psychiatrist wrote in a series of court reports, and Qahtani is suspicious of US military doctors, probably because military doctors accompanied his interrogations. He refused psychotropic medication and in recent years has attempted suicide several times, by hanging, cutting himself and swallowing shards of glass, court documents show.
In 2020, based on the psychiatrist’s work, a federal judge ordered an independent examination by a commission made up of three physicians, two of whom were non-Americans. The Trump administration’s Justice Department resisted the judge’s order, which would have led to the first foreign medical intervention in a prison of war.
Instead, Congress created the position of a Navy doctor who would be stationed at the Guantánamo base but work independently. Qahtani’s lawyers agreed to delay resolving the court case while the doctor studied military medical records and Keram’s findings. The government has until Monday (7) deadline to inform the court of its position regarding the judge’s order that requires an independent examination.
In May, Navy medic Corry J. Kucik agreed with Keram’s findings, according to people familiar with the seven-page report he wrote for the Periodic Review Board.
Kucik agreed that Qahtani was hampered by the brain damage he suffered in childhood and the schizophrenia he developed as a teenager, and also that his brutal interrogation and subsequent continued detention would have only exacerbated the problem.
Kucik also reportedly agreed that Qahtani cannot receive adequate care at Guantánamo and that he is extremely unlikely to pose a risk if he is transferred to a Saudi psychiatric hospital close to his family, where his mental health can be better treated.
