Getting Off the Island

Late one night in February 2004, the U.S. ambassador for war-crimes issues, Pierre-Richard Prosper, and the Danish ambas­sador to the United States, Ulrich Feder­spiel, sat in the living room of Denmark's ambassadorial residence in Washington ironing out the details of an agreement to repatriate Guantánamo's only Danish de­tainee. His name was Slimane Hadj Ab­derrahmane, and while he had drawn little attention in the United States, his fate had been the subject of intense negotia­tions between Danish diplomats and a group of high-ranking American officials, including Prosper, Undersecretary of De­fense Paul Wolfowitz and the White House National Security Council's legal adviser, John Bellinger.

The son of a Danish mother and Algerian father, Abderrahmane had been a money courier for a rebel Islamist group in Alge­ria before being picked up near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in the aftermath of 9/11. The Pentagon believed he was a committed jihadist. The U.S. had initially wanted Copenhagen to commit to try and/or detain Abderrahmane, but the Danes deemed the Pentagon's evidence against him weak. Danish intelligence agents' own interrogations of Abderrah­mane at Guantánamo did little to bolster the case for prosecution. If the Danes wouldn't hold or prosecute him, U.S. offi­cials at least wanted him closely moni­tored. They were concerned that the Danish government would lose track of Abderrahmane, and that he might slip easily through the porous European bor­ders and return to the battlefield. The Danes said they had no legal basis to do this, either. 

The shuttle diplomacy between Washing­ton and Copenhagen continued for months. As the talks dragged on, the Danes turned up the heat on the U.S. to make a deal. They had an important bit of leverage: Denmark was one of America's most dedicated allies in the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq. 

The two sides eventually hammered out the broad outlines of an agreement. If necessary, the Danes would use the country's extensive welfare system to track Abderrahmane. It was a far cry from prosecution, but it was the best the U.S. was going to do. Prosper and Federspiel did the final wordsmithing in Federspiel's residence near the National Cathedral. "We were operating under the assumption that this guy could literal­ly be walking out the door in Denmark in 24 hours," Prosper recalls.

By this point, a Danish plane was already en route to Guantánamo to pick up Abderrahmane. Prosper and Feder­spiel finished at a little after midnight, sent off the agreement to Copenhagen and opened a bottle of champagne. 

The public impression is that the debate over repatriating detainees has only just begun. In fact, the agreement with the Denmark was only one of many behind-the-scenes negotiations between U.S. officials and their foreign counterparts that have been going on since late 2002. That largely hidden chapter of diplomatic history—and the mixed results it yielded—illuminates the challenges Obama faces as he races to close Gitmo down. "Over five or six years, we had a multiple-ring circus of negotiations around the world that people really didn't know about," says John Bellinger, who helped spearhead those efforts, first at the National Security Council and later as legal adviser to then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. "I analogize it to the old duck metaphor: we were calm above the surface but furiously paddling our feet below the surface."

The paddling grew more furious with each passing year, as Guantánamo—and America's treatment of detainees in general—became an ever-expanding public-relations nightmare for the U.S. government. Concerns about what, precisely, would happen to the prisoners once they left Guantánamo gave way to a resolve to get them out, as quickly as they could. It was a mammoth diplomatic task: Prosper, the State Department's initial lead negotiator, spoke with diplomats from all of the 44 countries represented in Camp Delta save for Syria. The process, which under Bush resulted in the return of some 550 detainees, revealed the hard truth that the new administration now confronts: there is no good way out of Guantánamo.

The traditional approach to dealing with captured combatants is to hold them until  the end of hostilities. But it quickly became clear that this war, the war on ter­ror, could last for generations. By late 2002, some U.S. officials were beginning to question whether they were going to be able to hold the Gitmo detainees indefinitely. The admin­istration started taking its first, tentative steps toward returning some of them to their home countries.

Prosper, the son of Haitian immigrants and a former prosecutor at the international war-crimes tribunal in Rwanda, spearheaded the effort. "I would send out  a cable to all of the foreign governments that basically said, 'We've got your  guys'," he recalls. "'If we were to return them, what are your intentions, what  would you do with them?'"

The initial response was tepid. Given that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was describing these men as "terrorists"—"the worst of the worst"—it was perhaps not surprising that most countries were more than happy to have them outside their borders and in U.S. custody. Several governments raised doubts about whether the detainees in question had been correctly identified. They asked for more information, or even requested to speak to the individuals themselves. Nor was the Bush administration in a big rush to begin the process.