TerrorismU.S. judge: Guantánamo detention is legal even if U.S. winds down Afghanistan involvement

Published 31 July 2015

U.S. district judge Royce Lamberth on Thursday rejected a Guantánamo Bay detainee’s legal challenge, which claimed that his imprisonment was unlawful because President Barack Obama has declared an end to hostilities in Afghanistan. In January 2015 President Obama declared that “our combat mission in Afghanistan is over.” Muktar Yahya Najee Al-Warafi’s lawyers argued that since the United States was no longer involved in the war in Afghanistan, his detention was now unlawful under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which was the legal basis for the imprisonment of foreign fighters captured on overseas battlefields.

U.S. district judge Royce Lamberth on Thursday rejected a Guantánamo Bay detainee’s legal challenge, which claimed that his imprisonment was unlawful because President Barack Obama has declared an end to hostilities in Afghanistan.

Muktar Yahya Najee al-Warafi, a Yemeni citizen was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 and has been held at Guantánamo since then. His appeals have been rejected by different judges, who have upheld his detention because, they argued, he was likely to re-join the Taliban forces.

His lawyers have said he was a medic.

Al-Warafi’s ;attest appeal was based on the argument that since the Obama administration publicly announced that the United States was bringing its military involvement in Afghanistan to an end – in January 2015 President Obama declared that “our combat mission in Afghanistan is over” — it means that, for the United States, the war in Afghanistan had come to an end. Al-Warafi’s lawyers said that since the United States was no longer involved in the war in Afghanistan, his detention was now unlawful under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which was the legal basis for the imprisonment of foreign fighters captured on overseas battlefields.

The New York Times notes that the supreme court stressed in a 2004 opinion, Hamdi v Rumsfeld, that detention of individuals, such as the detention in Guantánamo, is legal only as long as “active hostilities” continue.

Judge Lamberth, however, wrote in his14-page opinion that the president’s statements notwithstanding, the government had offered “convincing evidence that U.S. involvement in the fighting in Afghanistan, against al-Qaeda and Taliban forces alike, has not stopped.” Therefore, Al-Warafi’s detention remains legal, he said.

“A court cannot look to political speeches alone to determine factual and legal realities merely because doing so would be easier than looking at all the relevant evidence,” Lamberth wrote. “The government may not always mean what it says or say what it means.”

Brian Foster, al-Warafi’s lawyer, said the judge’s opinion amounted to a “rubber stamp for endless detention.” He said he would consider an appeal.

Faez Mohammed Ahmed al-Kandari, a Kuwaiti who was sent to Guantánamo following his 2001 capture after the battle of Tora Bora, has lodged a similar petition, which is now pending before another judge in Washington.