The Guantanamo Bay detention center isn’t anyone’s idea of an assisted living facility. But the controversial prison that former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared in 2002 would hold “the worst of the worst” terrorism suspects has been open for so long that many inmates are now elderly people with health problems. Today, the Biden administration finally released the oldest prisoner, a 75-year-old Pakistani man, Saifullah Paracha, and returned him to Pakistan. Paracha, once a wealthy businessman who lived in New York City, had been at the Cuban base since 2003, when the US government “captured” him in Thailand. He was never charged with a crime.
According to the Associated Press, Paracha suffers from diabetes and heart problems, among other ailments, and is in such poor health that the government says he is “not a continuing threat” to the US. It’s not clear that Paracha was ever a threat to the US. His son Uzair Paracha, then 23, was convicted in the US in 2005 of providing material support for terrorism, in a prosecution based on the same witnesses who provided the basis for holding his father in Cuba. In 2020, a federal judge threw out those witness statements in his case, largely because the government had withheld exculpatory material about them from Uzair’s lawyers, and Uzair was returned to Pakistan.
Saifullah Paracha at the Guantanamo Bay detention center.
Counsel to Saifullah Paracha / AP
Those witnesses, also held at Guantanamo, included people the CIA tortured and waterboarded, notably Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the man the government accuses of masterminding the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. After nearly 20 years in US custody, first in a secret prison, then at Guantanamo, KSM will finally stand trial for his alleged role in 9/11 early next month. (He’s not as old as Paracha, but at 57, KSM has reached the age of AARP membership eligibility.)
