Mohammad Mani Ahmad al-Qahtani was, up until recently, one of the 39 remaining detainees at Guantánamo; however, last week, Old Joe Biden’s handlers announced that after twenty years in the camp, al-Qahtani was being sent back home to Saudi Arabia for “treatment for mental illness.” What could possibly go wrong?
The Department of Defense announced that “on June 9, 2021, the Periodic Review Board process determined that law of war detention of Mohammad Mani Ahmad al-Qahtani was no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the national security of the United States. Therefore, the PRB recommended that al-Qahtani be repatriated to his native country of Saudi Arabia, subject to security and humane treatment assurances.” The freeing of al-Qahtani, according to the DoD, was part of a “process focused on responsibly reducing the detainee population and ultimately closing of [sic] the Guantanamo Bay facility.”
Al-Qahtani has been in custody since December 2001, when he was captured in Afghanistan fighting against American forces. Not long before that, on Aug. 3, 2001, he arrived in Orlando, Fla. on a flight from Dubai but was refused entry and sent back on suspicions that he was trying to settle in the U.S. illegally. 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta was waiting at the Orlando airport to pick him up, leading to speculation that he planned to participate in the 9/11 hijackings.
Holding al-Qahtani in Gitmo for twenty years without trial stemmed from the fact that he was being treated as a prisoner of war. In past wars also, soldiers who became prisoners of war were generally not tried; they were held until the end of hostilities and then released. But the “war on terror” did not have any definable endpoint, so there was no endpoint for the jihadis in Guantanamo. Some jihadis actually were tried, and others are still awaiting trial, because despite calling it a “war,” the U.S. government still persisted in treating each act of jihad as if it were a separate and discrete criminal act, without any relationship to any larger conflict. Also, not being able to tie people such as al-Qahtani to any specific crime meant they would have to be tried, if they were tried at all, simply for membership in the Taliban or al-Qaeda, and that would be an easy case to lose in the absence of any evidence of actual criminal activity.