Who Is Left at Guantánamo?
On January 20, 2016, Mohammed Ali Abdullah Bwazir stood with shackles on his ankles, wrists, and waist at the bottom of a ramp leading up to a U.S. Air Force cargo plane. The plane was going to take him, along with two other Guantánamo Bay prisoners, to an undisclosed southern European nation. Bwazir, who is either 35 or 36 and is from Yemen, had been cleared for release after spending 14 years in the U.S. prison in Cuba.
He refused to get on the plane.
“He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t acting out. He was very calm,” Army Colonel David Heath, the Guantánamo prison warden, later to Carol Rosenberg, the reporterwho has been covering the prison since it first opened. Bwazir’s lawyer, John Chandler, the man was depressed and feared living in a country where he had no family. Bwazir wanted to go to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, or Indonesia, where he has
