U.S. Sends 11 Guantánamo Prisoners to Oman to Start New Lives

The U.S. military sent 11 Yemeni prisoners at Guantánamo Bay to Oman to restart their lives, the Pentagon said on Monday, leaving just 15 men in the prison in a bold push at end of the Biden administration that has left the prison population smaller than at any time in its more than 20-year history.

None of the released men had been charged with crimes during their two decades of detention. Now, all but six of the remaining prisoners have been charged with or convicted of war crimes.

There were 40 detainees when President Biden took office and resurrected an Obama administration effort to close the prison.

The Pentagon carried out the secret operation in the early hours of Monday, days before Guantánamo’s most notorious prisoner, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was scheduled to plead guilty to plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in exchange for a life sentence rather than face a death-penalty trial.

The handoff had been in the works for about three years. An initial plan to conduct the transfer in October 2023 was derailed by opposition from Congress.

The 11 who were released included Moath al-Alwi, a former long-term hunger striker who gained attention in the art world for building model boats from objects found at the Guantánamo prison; Abdulsalam al-Hela, whose testimony was sought by defense lawyers in the U.S.S. Cole case; and Hassan Bin Attash, the younger brother of a defendant in the Sept. 11 conspiracy case.

All of the prisoners were cleared for transfer through federal national-security review panels.

U.S. officials declined to say what the United States gave Oman, one of the most stable U.S. allies in the Middle East, and what guarantees it received in exchange. By law, the military cannot send Guantánamo prisoners to Yemen because, as a nation caught up in a brutal civil war, it is considered too unstable to monitor and rehabilitate returnees.