On June 6, 2007, the Department of Defense announced the transfer of Abdullahi Sudi Arale (also known as Ismail Mahmoud Muhammad) to the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. At the time, the U.S. military released a brief press release saying that Arale’s capture “exemplifies the genuine threat that the United States and other countries face throughout the world from dangerous extremists.” More specifically, the DOD claimed:
The Obama administration transferred Arale to Somaliland last week — just two and a half years later. What changed? Does the DOD now believe that Arale was wrongly detained, or that he is no longer a threat? Perhaps that is possible, but there are good reasons to doubt that is the case. Arale’s transfer was, comparatively speaking, a high-profile event. He was one of the last detainees transferred to Guantanamo. Arale was also captured in Eastern Africa, not South Asia as most of the other Gitmo detainees were. Thus, the DOD thought it necessary to defend the transfer decision in the aforementioned press release. This is somewhat unusual, to say the least, as most of the detainees who were transferred to Gitmo never had a press release announcing the DOD’s reasoning. Clearly, the military came to the conclusion that Arale was a particularly dangerous individual. There is another possibility: The Obama administration overruled the military’s assessment of Arale. When I visited Guantanamo earlier this month, I spoke with Brigadier General Timothy Lake, who took over as Deputy Commander for Joint Task Force Guantanamo in October. Lake reiterated several times that he and his staff have “zero input” and “zero influence” over the Obama administration’s transfer decisions. Instead, Lake said, they “provide information to the legal system” — meaning the Department of Justice and the State Department. In other words, the DOJ and Foggy Bottom control transfer decisions, not the military officials who have been responsible for detaining, interrogating, and analyzing the intelligence collected on each Gitmo detainee. That is not surprising. Lake’s comments reinforce what we’ve known for some months. The DOJ, in particular, plays a leading role in President Obama’s interagency review board, which in turn makes transfer decisions. Arale’s attorneys have claimed that he was just an innocent peace activist and teacher who was wrongfully detained. The military clearly did not think that was true in 2007. Does it now? Or, has the Obama administration decided to release the man who was once considered a key intermediary between senior al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan and their minions in Africa? We do not know the answers to these basic questions because there is absolutely no transparency when it comes to the Obama administration’s transfer decisions. Update: Here is one other important note about Arale. In June 2007, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman called Arale a “high-value detainee.” That phrase was reserved for less than twenty detainees. As far as I know, the U.S. has never transferred a “high-value detainee” from its custody. One “high-value detainee,” Ahmed Ghailani, was transferred to New York for trial. But he is, of course, still detained by the U.S. Does this mean that Arale was the first “high-value detainee” ever transferred from American custody?
