Guantánamo captive: I don't want to go home

[sabra]

Source: Miami Herald

A Guantánamo Bay captive is so fearful of returning to his homeland that he is fighting U.S. plans to send him there.

Even as the White House pledges to empty the prison camps at Guantánamo Bay, a 30-year-old prisoner is so afraid of returning to his native Tajikistan that he is asking to stay at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba.

Umar Abdulayev was brought to Guantánamo in the earliest crude Camp X-Ray days. Now, ''he's told us he'd rather stay another seven years in Guantánamo than go back to Tajikistan,'' said Chicago attorney Matthew J. O'Hara.

So while O'Hara has argued, like other detainees' lawyers, that his client is wrongly imprisoned, an innocent swept up in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the lawyer is trying to resist an Obama administration plan to send him to his homeland.

Abdulayev fled civil war in his homeland at age 13. He claims in court filings that he was visited by Tajik intelligence agents during his U.S. detention with a sinister offer: Spy on Muslim radicals in the former Soviet Republic in exchange for his release. When Abdulayev refused, the detainee claims, the agents threatened retribution.

...

At the Justice Department, spokesman Dean Boyd refused to address Abdulayev's specific claims. Broadly, he said the United States doesn't send foreigners with a credible fear of torture to another nation.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation/story/1131895.html

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[Jefferson23]

2. The legacy of Bush, it becomes more sordid over time.

[SkyDaddy7]

3. Well, that is not the first one to say they would rather stay than go...

Cheney/Bush left everything in such a mess there is no correct way of repairing anything foreign or domestic. Seriously, every problem Obama faces does not have a simple right wrong choice. Oh well, Obama said he loves challenges and I think it is safe to say he got his wish!

[Egnever]

4. this sounds like stockholm syndrome to me.

[sabra]

5. he wants to be sent to a different country - plus others who were sent back

are now serving long jail sentences:

<snip>

He is the last Tajik at Guantánamo. The Bush administration earlier repatriated 11 others, two of whom who Abdulayev claims likewise rebuffed agents' recruitment efforts and were returned in March 2007 and are now serving 17-year prison sentences.

[Generator]

6. " A credible fear of torture to another nation"

Ah irony, no one does it like the U S of A.