By Debra Sweet

Nine more prisoners — 8 of whom were cleared for release in 2009 — were let out of Guantanamo last week, sent to the U.S. close ally, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The 9 men are from Yemen... the country Saudi Arabia is relentlessly bombing.

Obama is in the Kingdom now, reinforcing the close relationship the U.S. keeps with it. Zaid Jilani and Alex Emmons wrote April 19 in Obama Went From Condemning Saudis for Abuses to Arming Them to the Teeth:

In January, after a record-setting year for Saudi beheadings, Saudi authorities set off protests by executing Shia cleric and regime critic Nimr al-Nimr. U.S. response was muted. The State Department merely said the execution “risks exacerbating sectarian tensions at a time when they urgently need to be reduced” — and then fell silent on the repression of the following protests.

Last year, amazingly enough, Saudi Arabia became the head of the 47-member U.N. Human Rights Council. When a State Department spokesperson was asked for his reaction, he responded: “Frankly, we would welcome it. We’re close allies.”

A recent State Department report on the Kingdom ignored the thousands of civilian casualties, presumbably because Saudi actions - and the sale to it of "record-breaking" arms sales — are seen by the people who run this country as being in the interests of the U.S.

Above, people protesting in Sana, Yemen

Tariq Ba Odah, hunger striker, released from Guantanamo

The best known of the prisoners is Tariq Ba Odah, on hunger strike since 2007. Even when he went to federal court last year with a demand to be released, the Obama administration fought it. Andy Worthington reports:

After more than eight years on a permanent hunger strike, he weighed just 74 pounds, and, according to medical experts and his lawyers, was at risk of death. Disgracefully, the Justice Department challenged his habeas petition, and, at the end of the year, Reuters revealed that the Pentagon had prevented representatives from an undisclosed foreign country that was prepared to offer him a new home from having access to his medical records, so that the country in question dropped its resettlement offer.

"His body appears unable to properly absorb calories or micronutrients," his lawyer Omar Farah of the Center for Constitutional Rights said last summer.

Murtaza Hussein brings excerpts from letters of another of the released prisoners, Mohammed al-Hamiri, in Prisoner’s Letters Document Tragedy and Hope Inside Guantánamo:

I want you to understand my reality. As far as I’m concerned the government has closed its door on our cases. Unfortunately, a tragedy happened on September 11, and many innocent people were killed. Every year on that same date people relive the suffering repeatedly; yet it is also saddening that other innocent people are dying or put in jail without having committed any crime. It doesn’t make sense for someone who gets stung by a thorn in his leg to start hitting everybody around him to relieve that pain, for he could be hurting innocent people.

Mohammed al-Hamiri bending down to kiss his mother’s feet after his release in Saudi Arabia.  Source: AlRiyadh.com

Are you seeing the reports that the "forever prisoners," those not charged with any crime, but which the Obama administration is not willing to try or release, may go to the Florence CO ADX federal prison, in the high desert?

What would it mean to institutionalize detention without charge in federal prisons?