Washington DC, January 16, 2010 – Mohammed Sulaymon Barre was released from Guantanamo on December 20, 2009, and returned to his family in Somaliland. Mr. Barre had fled Somalia during the civil war in the early 1990s. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees granted Mr. Barre refugee status in Pakistan where he lived and worked freely for many years prior to his detention.

In November 2001, soon after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistani authorities came to Mr. Barres house in the middle of the night and arrested him.

He is believed to have been sold to the United States for bounty at a time when the United States was offering sizable sums for the handover of purported enemies. Once in the custody of U.S. forces, Mr. Barre was sent to the U.S. military base at Bagram, where U.S. guards abused him and coercively interrogated him before transferring him to Guantánamo. He was never charged with any crime.

Earlier Monday, CCR…

…held a public briefing at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. with activists and human rights attorneys to mark the beginning of the ninth year of detention without charge or trial at Guantánamo following a rally and march that morning. The briefing, titled “Obama’s Guantánamo,” addressed issues including the continued and worsening lack of transparency, resettlement for men who cannot return to their home countries, the threat of indefinite detention schemes in the U.S., the halt of transfers to Yemen and related responses to the recent terrorism attempt, and more.

Lakhdar Boumediene called in to the briefing from his home in France, and Omar Deghayes joined the briefing from his home in the United Kingdom. Mr. Boumediene was the lead plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court case of 2008, Boumediene v. Bush brought by CCR and co-counsel, in which the Court affirmed that Guantànamo detainees have the right to file writs of habeas corpus in U.S. federal courts. He was released on May 15, 2009. As a child, Omar Deghayes settled with his family in the U.K. as a refugee from Lybia. Picked up in Pakistan and sent to Bagram and Guantánamo, he was blinded in one eye at the base in 2004. Mr. Deghayes was released from Guantanamo to the U.K. on December 19, 2007.

From the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR):

To learn more and see a video of Mr. Barre's statement and other resources, visit http://ccrjustice.org/obamas-guantanamo. 

Source: The Public Record, January 12, 2010

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