Nineteen years after he was captured in Afghanistan, and five years after a review board ruled he posed no threat to the United States, Abdul Latif Nasser was finally released this month from the U.S. military prison complex at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and repatriated to his native Morocco. He became the first prisoner transferred from the notorious detention facility in more than three years.
The move became the first real sign that there’s an effort underway to close Guantánamo. Since President Joe Biden came into office, however, administration officials at the Pentagon, State Department and National Security Council have quietly been working on a strategy to shutter the facility, built after the al-Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Designed to detain individuals apprehended by the U.S. in its War on Terror, the prison has become a costly and damaging quagmire for the U.S. government, once labelled by Amnesty International as the “gulag of our time.”
Read the full article in Time Magazine.
