A federal judge on Saturday temporarily prevented the U.S. government from transferring a disabled prisoner to Iraq from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, while the judge considered the prisoner’s claim that he would be at risk for abuse and inadequate health care there.
The prisoner, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, 63, is the oldest of the 15 detainees at Guantánamo and has a paralyzing spine disease that has required six surgeries at the base. He is serving a sentence on a war crimes conviction, and the United States had negotiated an agreement for him to finish it in Iraqi custody at a prison in Baghdad.
On Jan. 3, Mr. Hadi filed a lawsuit to stop the transfer, invoking his rights to humane treatment. He used his birth name, Nashwan al-Tamir, not the alias under which the United States has held him, Hadi the Iraqi.
In a three-sentence order Saturday night, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the Federal District Court in Washington wrote that the government was “hereby enjoined from transferring Mr. al-Tamir to Iraq without his consent until the pending claims are resolved.” It was accompanied by a 61-page memorandum, which was under seal and therefore not publicly accessible.
The judge issued the order two days before U.S. forces could have secretly flown Mr. Hadi to Iraq. The Defense Department sent Congress a classified notice on Dec. 13 that it would transfer him after 30 days.
The order means that Mr. Hadi has no means of leaving the offshore prison until the judge decides the larger question of whether the Iraqi prison has inadequate health care and whether it would be dangerous for him in particular to be repatriated. The State Department has found no other country to take him.
The department had negotiated Mr. Hadi’s transfer to Iraq as part of a surge of releases in the final days of the Biden administration. In the past month, the Pentagon has sent two Malaysian convicts to their homeland, 11 Yemeni detainees to a rehabilitation program in Oman, one detainee to Tunisia and another to Kenya.
It is not clear how the next Trump administration will handle transfers. The last one froze most of the release process, but allowed one transfer, sending a convicted Saudi terrorist to serve his sentence at a prison in Saudi Arabia in 2018.
With 15 detainees, Guantánamo now has the smallest population since it opened on Jan. 11, 2002, with the arrival of 20 prisoners from Afghanistan.
Mr. Hadi’s case was unusual because, while the men who were recently transferred left Guantánamo voluntarily, he and his lawyers opposed his repatriation to Iraq, which he fled in 1990 to avoid conscription into Saddam Hussein’s army.
After leaving Iraq, he settled in Afghanistan, married and rose to a position of prominence as a commander of Taliban and Al Qaeda forces after the U.S. invasion. In 2003 and 2004, some of those forces used the cover of civilians in attacks that killed 17 members of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan. One fighter, for example, posed as a cabdriver in a taxi laden with explosives.
In 2022, he pleaded guilty to war crimes charges at a U.S. military commission and accepted responsibility for the actions of those he commanded in a deal that would have ended his sentence in 2032. The deal also included the possibility that he would serve the sentence in the custody of another country better suited to provide him with medical care than the U.S. military at Guantánamo.
His lawsuit this month claimed that the State Department was reneging on the deal by seeking to send him to a facility with inadequate medical care, and that he feared for his safety in Iraqi custody.
The State Department negotiates the transfers, which include security assurances that the receiving country will monitor the former prisoners’ activities and share information with the United States. But there are restrictions. By domestic law, the Pentagon cannot send detainees from Guantánamo to countries that are too unstable to keep track of them, such as Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia and Yemen. By international law, they cannot arrange to send them to a country where they could be subjected to human rights abuses.
Mr. Hadi was born in Mosul, Iraq, in 1961, and served in the Iraqi Army throughout the Gulf War with Iran in the 1980s. He was captured in Turkey in 2006 and held by the C.I.A. until his transfer to U.S. military custody in 2007. He was first charged in 2014 and pleaded guilty eight years later.
In his time at Guantánamo, he has gone from an able-bodied detainee to one who had a prison cell specially equipped with devices to accommodate disabilities, needed a four-wheeled walker to move about and was brought to court in a wheelchair.
