After 20 intensely irritating months of inaction, the Biden administration is — finally, belatedly — making up for lost time, releasing prisoners from Guantánamo, ending the second longest period in the prison’s long and sordid history that no prisoners have been freed.

The good news began yesterday, when the Pentagon announced that Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu, the prison’s sole Kenyan prisoner, and one of 16 men long approved for release by high-level US government review processes, had been repatriated, as I reported here. Bajabu arrived at Guantánamo nearly 18 years ago, in March 2007, after brief and brutal stays in secret US prisons in Djibouti and at Bagram airbase, and had been held without charge or trial at Guantánamo ever since.

Read the rest here: https://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2024/12/18/guantanamo-two-malaysians-convicted-of-terrorism-repatriated-to-serve-out-the-rest-of-their-sentences-18-men-never-charged-are-still-held/

The situation these men find themselves in is complicated by the fact that most of them cannot be repatriated, based on provisions approved every year in the annual National Defense Authorization Act that prevent the return of prisoners to certain proscribed countries, including Yemen, where most of the 15 are from.

But then back to Biden again:

However, 14 months ago these men were meant to be resettled in Oman, a plan that was cancelled by the administration while a plane was on the runway at Guantánamo. This was because of what were regarded by senior administration officials as the negative “political optics” of freeing men from Guantánamo after the attacks in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

"Political optics"! Two decades and 4 administrations full of optics.

Email Biden here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/