Pentagon transfers 5 Gitmo detainees

The Defense Department is transferring five detainees from the Guantánamo Bay detention center to Slovakia and the Democratic Republic of Georgia.

The five are among the 55 cleared for release by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force in 2010.

{mosads}The Defense Department sent Hashim Bin Ali Bin Amor Sliti and Husayn Salim Muhammad Al-Mutari Yafai to Slovakia. Salah Mohammed Salih Al-Dhabi, Abdel Ghaib Ahmad Hakim, and Abdul Khaled Al-Baydani were sent to Georgia.

In a statement Thursday, the Pentagon thanked both countries for their “willingness to support ongoing U.S. efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.”

Obama has tried to close the detention center since he took office, but has been blocked by Congress. Both the House and the Senate have voted to keep it open.

Some lawmakers, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), have voiced significant opposition to the administration’s detainee transfers, most notably when the White House exchanged five Taliban detainees for a prisoner of war, Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, a group that represents Hakim, a Yemeni man who spent more than 10 years in Guantanamo, praised his release.

“We are grateful to the Republic of Georgia for offering our client a new home where he can begin to rebuild his life after more than a decade in Guantánamo without charge or trial,” the group said in a statement.

The center noted that Hakim is the first Yemeni to be transferred out of the detention center since 2010 and that 84 of the 143 detainees still at Guantánamo are Yemeni.

The government has balked at sending Yemenis back to their country because of instability there.

Wells Dixon, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, though, said the turmoil in Yemen shouldn’t force Yemenis to be kept in Guantánamo any longer than necessary.  

“As we welcome Mr. Alhag’s resettlement, we are reminded that the remaining Yemeni men should be sent home or resettled without further delay,” he said, using an alternate name for Hakim.

–This post was updated at 5:09 p.m.