10 Yemeni prisoners to be freed by U.S. from Guantanamo
CBS News has confirmed that ten Yemenis held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will be transferred to Middle East countries willing to take them.
With that, the population at the U.S. detention camp for terror suspects will fall below 100 for the first time.
President Obama had vowed to close Guantanamo in his first address to Congress in 2009, but Congress has blocked him. In his final State of the Union address Tuesday night, Mr. Obama said he would keep working to close the prison.
In November, five men who had been held for more than 13 years at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were released and sent to the United Arab Emirates, the Pentagon had said.
The five Yemeni men were accepted for resettlement in the Persian Gulf nation after U.S. authorities determined they no longer posed a threat, the Defense Department said in a statement.
The released men who arrived in the UAE were identified as Ali Ahmad Muhammad al-Razihi, Khalid Abd-al-Jabbar Muhammad Uthman al-Qadasi, Adil Said al-Hajj Ubayd al-Busays, Sulayman Awad Bin Uqayl al-Nahdi, and Fahmi Salem Said al-Asani.
None of the men had been charged with a crime but had been detained as enemy combatants. They could not be sent to their homeland because the U.S. considers Yemen too unstable to accept prisoners from Guantanamo. These were the first prisoners accepted by the UAE for resettlement.