The Obama administration's attempts to get various European nations to take dozens of Guantanamo detainees continue to be met with uneven results. Austria has now joined several other European nations, including the Czech Republic, in declining to take any Guantanamo detainees at all. "If the detainees are no longer dangerous, why don't they stay in the U.S.," Interior Minister Maria Fekter said during a meeting of European nations today. "For Austria, I cannot accept Guantanamo inmates."
On the other hand, France, Spain and Portugal are on the record as saying they will take Gitmo detainees. In a meeting with President Obama last week, French President Sarkozy said that his nation would be willing to take one Algerian detainee with ties to France. The specific detainee has not been named, but press reports indicate that Lakhdar Boumediene and Sabir Mahfouz Lahmar are the two Algerians being considered.
Boumediene and Lahmar were both members of the "Algerian Six," a group that was acquitted of plotting to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo in late 2001. The detention of these six has been especially controversial because they were swept up by U.S. forces and brought to Guantanamo after their acquittal. The U.S. government then dropped charges related to the putative plot against the U.S. Embassy, but claimed that the six were preparing to fight in Afghanistan. In November of 2008, the D.C. District Court ruled that five of the six should be freed. Three of the six were released to Bosnia, but Boumediene and Lahmar were kept at Guantanamo because, according to some press accounts, they lacked Bosnian citizenship.
The Algerian Six's case is rather complicated. From my analysis of their files and open source information, it does appear that three or four of them were low-level functionaries. But we can not be sure of course. The D.C. court ruled that Bensayah Belkacem, the leader of the group, was properly held by the U.S. as an enemy combatant. According to unclassified files produced at Guantanamo, Belkacem was apparently preparing to orchestrate terrorist acts from Iran. And Belkacem was reportedly in contact by phone with top al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah.
In my opinion, the court's ruling with respect to Sabir Mahfouz Lahmar, one of the five the court said should be released, was erroneous and ignored many facts about Lahmar's past. Lahmar was clearly part of the al Qaeda network in Bosnia in the 1990's. Lahmar was listed as one of the most wanted criminals in Bosnia at one point and was charged with involvement in various criminal and terrorist acts, including a car bombing in Mostar. He was only freed as part of a general amnesty deal the Bosnian government, which was then incredibly duplicitous in its dealings, cut with "Mujahidin" such as Lahmar. None of these facts appeared in the court's ruling, but that may be the fault of prosecutors. I don't know whether or not they raised any of this during the hearings for the Algerian Six.
Thus, if the French government is preparing to take Lahmar we can only hope it knows exactly who it is getting. And the French government is one of the few that has openly committed to taking at least one detainee.
Other European nations continue to insist that the Obama administration relocate some Guantanamo detainees onto American soil as a sign of good faith before they take any detainees. It appears that the Uighurs are prime targets for such relocation given that officials from the Obama administration traveled to Gitmo to talk with them last week and administration officials have mentioned them several times as candidates for freedom in the U.S. However, as I've argued before, the Uighurs' story is widely misunderstood.
It remains to be seen when and where the remaining Guantanamo detainees who will be freed are relocated. But the Europeans certainly are not making it easy on the Obama administration.
