[5] Sufyian Barhoumi and Abdul Latif Nasir tried to file emergency requests to be transferred from Guantanamo in the final days of Barack Obama's Presidency.
[6] Originally the Bush Presidency asserted that captives apprehended in the "war on terror" were not covered by the Geneva Conventions, and could be held indefinitely, without charge, and without an open and transparent review of the justifications for their detention.
[7] Scholars at the Brookings Institution, led by Benjamin Wittes, listed the captives still held in Guantanamo in December 2008, according to whether their detention was justified by certain common allegations:[8] Barhoumi had a writ of habeas corpus filed on his behalf, Civil Action No.
On September 24, 2009, Carol Rosenberg, writing in the Miami Herald, reported that U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer had ruled that the USA could continue to hold Sufiyan in Guantanamo.
[11] On April 25, 2011, whistleblower organization WikiLeaks published formerly secret assessments drafted by Joint Task Force Guantanamo analysts.
When it reported back, a year later, the Joint Review Task Force classified some individuals as too dangerous to be transferred from Guantanamo, even though there was no evidence to justify laying charges against them.
In July 2006, after considering Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the President lacked the Constitutional Authority to order Military Commissions.
[24][25] Carol J. Williams, writing in the Los Angeles Times reports that all five men had been connected by Abu Zubaydah—one of the three captives the CIA has acknowledged was interrogated using the controversial technique known as "waterboarding".
[26] Jess Bravin, writing in the Wall Street Journal, reported that, by 2013, Barhoumi had decided he would plead guilty, to any charge, because he saw a plea bargain as a way to win himself a fixed release date to look forward to.