Judge orders Kuwaiti released from Gitmo

updated 8:29 p.m. ET Sept. 25, 2009

WASHINGTON - A federal judge has ordered the release of a Kuwaiti man held at Guantanamo Bay and rebuked the U.S. government for relying on scant evidence, uncredible witnesses and coerced confessions to hold him for more than seven years.

In an opinion declassified Friday, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said government attorneys presented a "surprisingly bare" record during four days of classified hearings last month to oppose Fouad Al Rabiah's request for release from the U.S. naval detention facility in Cuba. She said the aviation engineer is being held almost exclusively on confessions obtained through abusive techniques and that his own interrogators repeatedly concluded were not believable.

"Incredibly, these are the confessions that the government has asked the Court to accept as truthful in this case," Kollar-Kotelly wrote in a 65-page opinion that was partially redacted to remove classified material. She called the coerced confessions "entirely incredible" and said they "defy belief."

"If there exists a basis for Al Rabiah's indefinite detention, it most certainly has not been presented to this court," she found.

Al Rabiah is the 30th Guantanamo detainee to be ordered released by a federal judge who has reviewed evidence justifying detention. Seven detainees have been denied a bid for freedom after a judge determined the evidence suggested they supported terrorism.

'It turns your stomach'
But some detainees who have won their freedom from a judge remain at Guantanamo because no other country is willing to accept them. Al Rabiah's attorney David Cynamon said Kuwait has said it would allow him to return home and he will be aggressively pushing for quick release.

"This case exemplifies everything that is wrong with Guantanamo," Cynamon said. "He's a completely innocent man and they torture him into confessing, right out of the North Korean and communist Chinese play book. It turns your stomach."

The Justice Department declined to comment on the judge's opinion.

Al Rabiah is a 50-year-old father of four with degrees in aviation studies from AST University in Scotland and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla. He worked for Kuwait Airways for 20 years, was part owner of a health club in Kuwait and often traveled to impoverished countries — he said it was for charitable relief work, but government attorneys argued it was in support of terrorist organizations.

Al Rabiah argued he traveled to Afghanistan in October 2001 to aid refugees, but government attorneys said it was to be with Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11 attacks. "The evidence in the record strongly supports Al Rabiah's explanation," Kollar-Kotelly wrote, citing letters that he wrote to his family describing his travels.

Al Rabiah was captured on Christmas Day 2001, as he tried to leave Afghanistan, and detained by U.S. troops. He was sent to Guantanamo in 2002 and Kollar-Kotelly found that from the beginning of his stay, "there is no evidence in the record that anyone directed any allegations toward Al Rabiah nor any indication that interrogators believed Al Rabiah had engaged in any conduct that made him lawfully detainable. To the contrary, the evidence in the record during this period consists mainly of an assessment made by an intelligence analyst that Al Rabiah should not have been detained."

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