Members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee expressed outrage Thursday about the disappearance of Guantanamo Bay transfer Jihad Ahmed Mustjafa Diyab, who was part of a six-person group released to Uruguay in December 2014.
Chairman Ed Royce, a California Republican, scolded the Obama administration for its agreement to send Diyab and his cohort to the South American country, contending the monitoring and security there was too lax. Royce’s position was the administration should have known that all along.
“When a country tells you that they won’t prevent a terrorist from traveling, then you had better listen if your intention is to release that terrorist into that country,” Royce told Paul Lewis and Lee Wolosky, Gitmo envoys from the Departments of Defense and State.
As Stephen F. Hayes recently recalled, Uruguayan president Jose Mujica said his country would not track the former detainees upon their arrival. “They are coming as refugees and the first day that they want to leave, they can leave,” Mujica said, according to Reuters.
Diyab fell off the radar in recent weeks, informing “several people” he was off on a religious retreat and would be unreachable, the New York Times reported. There’s been speculation that he traveled to Brazil, as well. Regardless, Uruguayan officials have insisted that Diyab’s behavior has been legal, with a government representative telling the Associated Press last month that “to say he fled the country is incorrect because he had the right to go.”
Diyab has taken advantage of that condition—three times now, according to Royce. The latest departure has lawmakers worried, even the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee.
“The thing that irks the chairman and, in fact, frankly, irks all of us, is the fact that this person was sent to Uruguay, and Uruguay apparently doesn’t have the ability to monitor this person who now has left the country,” New York representative Elliot Engel said at the hearing Thurdsay.
Diyab’s background as an al Qaeda associate and expert in document forgery has caused alarm among those interested in his whereabouts. Lewis and Wolosky sought to quell any alarm by arguing that the realistic goal of the U.S.-Uruguayan agreement was to mitigate risk.
“We talk to the Uruguayan authorities on a regular basis, we regularly review intelligence, we regularly look at this, and Secretary Hagel, who you know is a very forceful, careful, deliberate person, signed the congressional notification saying he felt that Uruguay could substantially mitigate any threat by this detainee,” Lewis said. Hagel was Secretary of Defense at the time the detainee transfer was executed.
Royce and the panel’s Republicans countered that the administration ignored multiple intelligence reports containing information to the contrary. Wolosky said there is more to moving detainees than consultation of such reports, characterizing the process as “rigorous” and inclusive of multiple principals across the intelligence and national security communities.
Diyab made it through that process—which was exactly the concern Thursday.
“At the end of the day, the Uruguayans gave them the travel card to travel. At the end of the day, he walked right out of there—three times. And this time, nobody can locate him to get him back into custody,” Royce said. “And he’s an al Qaeda-linked terrorist.”
