1 of 2 | A walkway separates the two sides of the abandoned Camp X-Ray detention camp at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base on July 23, 2015. One detainee at the since-closed Camp X-Ray, Mohammed al-Qahtani, was recommended for release and transfer to Saudi Arabia by a Pentagon board on Friday. File Photo by Ezra Kaplan/UPI
Feb. 5 (UPI) -- A mentally ill detainee held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, should be transferred to a rehabilitation facility in Saudi Arabia after two decades of imprisonment, a Pentagon board announced Friday.
The detainee, Mohammed al-Qahtani, was suspected of being an intended hijacker in Al Qaeda's attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. He was captured and sent to the American naval base in 2002, where military interrogators tortured Qahtani early in his detention. A senior Pentagon official would later determine that the treatment left him unfit to stand trial.
In a release, the six-person Periodic Review Board announced it had come to a consensus that Qahtani's detention "is no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States."
The facility would provide Qahtani with mental health care and extremism rehabilitation. Upon his completion of the program, the Pentagon board recommends the Saudi Arabian government implement "a comprehensive set of security measures including monitoring and travel restrictions."
The Biden administration may send Qahtani as early as March, The New York Times reported.
Officials have long been lost on what to do with Qahtani. The Saudi Arabian citizen had a history of schizophrenia and psychiatric hospitalization linked to a childhood brain injury before he was captured and sent to Guantanamo.
Authorities believe that Qahtani, who reportedly attempted to enter the country two months before the Sept. 11 attacks to meet with an Al Qaeda ringleader, was meant to join the team that hijacked United Airlines Flight 93. The flight was likely intended for the U.S. Capitol but passengers fought back, diverting the plane to crash in a Pennsylvania field.
U.S. forces captured Qahtani along the Pakistani border with a group of foreign fighters shortly after the attacks.
At Guantánamo, the military subjected Qahtani to sustained, brutal torture in late 2002 and early 2003. Logs leaked to Time Magazine in 2005 show interrogators placed him in solitary confinement, exposed him to prolonged periods of cold exposure and sleep deprivation, and exacted sexual and psychological humiliations including making him bark like a dog. They extracted a confession, which Qahtani later recanted.
In 2008, a top Bush administration official concluded that the military's actions amounted to torture and left Qahtani in a "life-threatening condition," leaving him unfit for prosecution. The U.S. government subsequently dropped all charges against him.
"We tortured Qahtani," convening authority of military commissions Susan Crawford told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward at the time. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case."
In March 2020, a federal judge ordered that the military allow a panel of foreign and American doctors to examine Qahtani, a departure from the court's usual deference to the military on activity at Guantánamo.
That examination resulted in a recommendation that Qahtani be transferred, a recommendation also formally adopted by the six-person Pentagon board in June. The Biden administration held off on making the announcement public until Friday, likely because it was negotiating the terms of the agreement with Saudi Arabia, The New York Times reported.
Approximately 780 detainees have been held at Guantánamo since 2002. Qahtani, now in his 40s, is one of just 39 who remain.
