US Releases Five Yemeni Prisoners From Guantanamo

US President Barack Obama signed an executive order to close the camp shortly after taking power in 2009, establishing the Guantanamo Review Task Force to review and clear prisoners for release.

Obama has vowed since his 2008 presidential campaign to close the facility, at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The centerpiece of that plan is expected to be a provision to move to a prison in the United States the 59 remaining detainees who are not recommended for transfer. Each had been held for more than 13 years, the Associated Press reports, and had not been charged with a crime.

“The administration is showing that if it wants to close Guantanamo, it can, and it can do it the right way by releasing people and stop holding them without charge”, said Andrea Prasow, who follows detainee issues for Human Rights Watch.

Most of the five men are described as low-level fighters in American military assessments.

The detainees were lower level inmates from Yemen, which is the country most Guantanamo inmates who are recommended for transfer are from. The fifth detainee, Ali Ahmad Muhammad al-Razihi, 36, a suspected bodyguard for the late Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, was previously deemed to unsafe to release but a parole board took another look at his case a year ago and determined he no longer posed a national security threat and could be transferred. They could not be sent to their homeland because the U.S. considers Yemen too “unstable” to accept prisoners from Guantanamo.

The transfers reduced the detainee population at the prison to 107.

President Obama has made closing the prison a priority, saying that militants use it as a recruiting tool and that it has harmed the image of the United States.

The US transferred 17 detainees to Oman in June, three others to Qatar in April, one to Morocco and one to Saudi Arabia in September and one to Mauritania last month.

I feel that if Obama goes around Congress on this matter, the United States of America should take any and all legal action they have to against him.