Obama officials misled Congress over the standards applied to terrorist prisoners who are transferred from Guantanamo Bay to other countries, lawmakers charged on Thursday.
Two Obama administration officials were called before the House Foreign Affairs Committee over the transfers and their past statements of the transfers, which are supposed to ensure the released prisoners no longer pose a threat to the U.S.
The officials testified in March that the transfer process included rigorous safeguards to ensure that the countries accepting Guantanamo prisoners did not allow them to return to the battlefield and pose a threat to the United States.
But in June, one of six former detainees released to Uruguay has disappeared, and no one knows where he is.
The man, Jihad Ahmed Dhiab, is a Syrian who had been linked to al Qaeda and was thought to have slipped in Brazil, but Brazil has no record of him entering the country.
House Foreign Affairs Chairman Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif was incensed that the committee was told in March that Uruguay met the standard for mitigating the risk posed by terrorists, only to find that under the terms of the transfer Uruguay was accepting these detainees as “refugees,” not former terrorists, and that Uruguayan law prohibits monitoring, surveillance or imposing travel restrictions on them.
“Why did you provide false assurances to Congress? Why did you mislead us about Uruguay’s capabilities?” Royce pressed the witnesses.
“Mr. Chairman I strongly disagree with any suggestion that I misled this committee, in fact I stand by my testimony from March in which I affirmed that Uruguay had committed to, and is in fact taking steps to substantially mitigate the risk,” said Lee Wolosky, State Department special envoy for Guantanamo Bay closure.
Wolosky said while the Obama administration would have preferred that Dhiab remained in Uruguay for the full two-year resettlement period, the fact he is now missing does not indicate the decision to send him to Uruguay was flawed. “The standard in not elimination of risk, it is mitigation of risk,” he said.
Wolosky also said Dhiab was a problem from the moment he landed in Uruguay and did not want to abide by the restrictions of the program.
“I have to say from what we can tell the president has made a political decision to close Guantanamo no matter what the cost to national security,” Royce said. “In fact, it appears the administration has released dangerous terrorists to ill-equipped countries on numerous occasions.”
