WASHINGTON:
The United States has sent a Sudanese man, accused of guarding Osama bin Laden and helping him escape US forces, back to Sudan after being held at Guantanamo Bay prison for over a decade, the Pentagon said on Wednesday.
Ibrahim al Qosi was sentenced to 14 years after pleading guilty in 2010 to conspiring with al Qaeda and providing material support to terrorism, the Pentagon said in a statement.
He completed his reduced, two-year sentence before his transfer took place, the statement said.
The Pentagon declined to say whether Qosi, described as a “cook and sometimes driver” for al Qaeda, had been freed in Sudan or held by the government there.
“We coordinated with the government of Sudan on appropriate security measures to mitigate any threat that he continues to pose,” said Lieutenant Colonel Todd Breasseale, a Pentagon spokesperson.
Qosi was alleged to have run the kitchen at bin Laden’s Star of Jihad compound in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and of having been part of an al Qaeda mortar crew.
He was accused of acting as a cook and bodyguard for the former al Qaeda leader, who was killed by US forces in Abbottabad last year, and helping him escape to the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan in 2001.
He was captured in Afghanistan in December 2001 and first charged in the Guantanamo court system known as military commissions in 2004.
US efforts to resettle prisoners cleared for release from Guantanamo Bay, set up in Cuba after the 9/11 attacks, have been stymied by government refusals to allow any into the United States and by other restrictions imposed by Congress.
In April two members of China’s Muslim Uighur minority became the first prisoners to leave Guantanamo Bay in more than 15 months. They were resettled in El Salvador.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 12th, 2012.
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If poor people like al-Qosi, that take a job anywhere they can find it to support their families, commit war crimes as his prosecutors claimed, then all U.S. contractors with the Pentagon are war criminals too. They provide material support to our military that has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians - like the 3.000 9/11 victims- in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan!
There is a fact here that cannot be ignored. After 9/11 we became berserk, and thirsty for blood. And we just went around the world to small and poor poor Muslim countries that couldn't defend themselves, and started killing, kidnapping and torturing with impunity. Even maids, cooks, and messengers were treated as war criminals! And we did that because we could, not because it was right. We are a superpower, and we operate on the arrogant mode "Might is Right." But is it? Not in the opinion of 75% of the people in our planet that hate the U.S. arrogance and warmongering - according to every statistic available. What's next? How about arresting as war criminals the owners of bakeries in Yemen for selling bread to militants associated with Al Qaeda? Those militants can't operate without bread, can they? And that is considered material support to the enemy by U.S. prosecutors - as the conviction of al-Qosi reveals! Nikos Retsos, retired professor, Chicago