Fouad Mahmoud al-Rabiah

Fouad Mahmoud al-Rabiah, a Kuwaiti national, who was detained at Guantanamo for eight years and tortured in a case of mistaken identity has been freed and was transferred to Kuwait, the Justice Department announced Wednesday.

As directed by President Obama’s Jan. 22, 2009 Executive Order, the interagency Guantanamo Review Task Force conducted a comprehensive review of this case. As a result of that review, the detainee was approved for transfer from Guantanamo Bay. In accordance with Congressionally-mandated reporting requirements, the Administration informed Congress of its intent to transfer the detainee at least 15 days before his transfer.

On Sept. 17, 2009, a federal court ruled that al-Rabiah may no longer be detained under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force and ordered the government to release him from detention at Guantanamo Bay.

According to Reuters:

…al-Rabiah, a Kuwaiti Airways engineer, was captured in Afghanistan and accused by the United States of providing money to Osama bin Laden and helping Taliban fighters in the mountainous Tora Bora region. His lawyers said it was a case of mistaken identity and a district court judge in September ordered Mr. Rabiah freed after determining that confessions to interrogators under harsh conditions were not believable.

Last September, the SCOTUS blog reported:

Of the 38 decisions so far by federal judges implementing the Supreme Court’s mandate in Boumediene v. Bush to test the legality of Guantanamo Bay detentions, the most critical assessment of government evidence has just emerged, in Al Rabiah v. U.S..  Decided on Sept. 17, but just released… in an unclassified version, the 65-page ruling by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly is measured in tone but sweeping in impact.  Despite heavy deletions, blacking out many details, what remains is a withering denunciation of military and intelligence data.  (The opinion can be read here.)

Fully half of the document consists of a detailed examination of a series of confessions given by the detainee, a Kuwaiti national named Fouad Mahmoud Al Rabiah, with the judge ultimately concluding that the government interrogators themselves decided that the admissions were not to be believed.  “Al Rabiah’s interrogators ultimately extracted confessions from him, but they never believed his confessions,” the opinion noted.

Kollar-Kotelly summed up:  ”Far from providing the Court with credible and reliable evidenced as the basis for Al Rabiah’s continued detention, the Government asks this Court to simply accept the same confessions that the Government’s own interrogators did not credit, and to ignore the assessment of [a government intelligence analyst at Guantanamo "that Al Rabiah should not have been detained"].

Kollar-Kotelly also noted in her opinion that she found credible allegations by Al Rabiah and his lawyers that his confessions “were the result of coercion or harsh interrogation techniques, including warnings that he could never return to Kuwait if he did not confess, and that no one would ever leave Guantanamo Bay if they had not confessed to some link to terrorism.”

Al-Rabiah’s transfer was carried out under an arrangement between the United States and the government of Kuwait. The United States will continue to consult with the government of Kuwait regarding this individual, the Justice Department said.