U.S. releases long-serving prisoner from Guantánamo

A former television cameraman for Al Jazeera who was believed to be the only journalist in U.S. custody at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has been released after more than six years of detention that made him one of the best known Guantánamo prisoners in the Arab world, his lawyers said.

Sami al-Hajj became a cause célèbre in recent years for Al Jazeera, which often displayed his photograph and carried reports on his case.

He was also one of Guantánamo's long-term hunger strikers, and his lawyers at the British legal group Reprieve drew wide attention to what they said was his declining physical and mental health. U.S. military officials have said all prisoners were treated humanely at the Guantánamo camp.

"It is yet another case where the U.S. has held someone for years and years and years on the flimsiest of evidence" without filing charges, said one of the lawyers, Zachary Katznelson.

Hajj, 38, was sent with at least two other prisoners to his native Sudan on Thursday on a U.S. military aircraft, the lawyers said.

The Pentagon declined to comment.

Military officials have insisted that Hajj was a courier of terrorism money intended for Chechen rebels.

The case did not draw the attention among American journalists that some of them said it deserved, in part because Hajj's full life story was not known. As with most Guantánamo detainees, the Pentagon's evidence against him was largely secret. "I would have rather seen more of an outcry," said Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which tried to call attention to Hajj's detention.

The release of Hajj was part of a Bush administration effort to reduce the numbers of prisoners at the Guantánamo jail, which is believed to hold about 270 men.

Pentagon officials say many released detainees remain terrorism threats and insist that countries that receive them take steps to monitor them or take other steps to reduce the threats they pose.

But Katznelson, the attorney, said he did not expect that Hajj would be charged by Sudan. He said Hajj had been "almost overwhelmed" at the prospect of seeing his 7-year-old son, who was an infant when he left home. But he said the former prisoner's health was so fragile that he would immediately go to a hospital after his military plane touched down in the capital, Khartoum.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/02/america/gitmo.php

U.S. releases long-serving prisoner from Guantánamo

U.S. releases long-serving prisoner from Guantánamo

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