This is a book about twelve men who spent their best years locked up at Guantanamo Bay. None has ever been convicted of anything or ever will be. What they share is that they are all from the same small country of Kuwait. They are all Muslims.
All were beloved family members in a close-knit society where there is great family cohesion. They left mothers and fathers, wives and children, brothers and sisters behind. Some had children who were born after they had been captured, children they did not meet until those children were four or five years old. Some had parents who died while they were away. What they also share is that they were all tortured under the authority of and by personnel of the US military and intelligence apparatus.
This is also a book about families, the families of these twelve men who lost their sons, husbands, and brothers and never knew when or if they would ever get them back. They grieved, but they also organized. They formed the “Family Committee,” headed by an American-trained military pilot, Khalid Al Odah, the father of one of these men, Fawzi Al Odah. The Family Committee began their long and uncertain journey to gain the release of their sons without funding, without a plan, and without support from their government. The Family Committee had the wisdom, however, to reach out to two lawyers based in the Gulf, one Kuwaiti and one American, and a Washington-based colleague, to work with them on a daily basis for more than fourteen years to secure the release of their children.
These three brave and capable people – Abdul Rahman Al Haroun, William Brown, and Marcia Newell – formed the “Core Team,” which persuaded the Kuwaiti government, unlike others, to lend its sovereign influence and resources to bringing its boys home. They initiated and coordinated extensive legal efforts in the United States that were necessary to gain the release of these twelve detainees. They did so not because they thought courts were likely to order them released, but because they knew that using the courts was indispensable in keeping their ordeals visible to the public and to a legal system that at least paid lip service to the rule of law. They never received any payment for their long and patient efforts.
Abdul Rahman Al Haroun (known to all as ARH) was and remains one of the leading commercial and energy lawyers in the region. But more than that, he had warm and trusting relationships throughout Kuwaiti society. Khalid Al Odah was a distant cousin, and his son Fawzi was one of the last two Kuwaitis held at Guantanamo, when it seemed he might be one of the “forever prisoners,” never charged but indefinitely detained without due process and possibly for life. For ARH, this was not only a legal matter, but one that implicated his country, his government, his profession and his family. He funded the initial American legal efforts from his own pocket.
ARH also wanted the stories of the long ordeal of the Kuwaiti detainees – legal, diplomatic, and personal – told, and he asked me to write this book. He helped me with access to both the men and Kuwaiti officials; he provided support while I completed the manuscript without ever asking for anything other than that these stories be preserved; he inspired this project, while never suggesting in any way what I should write.
I was fortunate enough to have been engaged by the Core Team to handle the hearings and negotiations to get the last two men, Fawzi Al Odah and Fayiz Al Kandari, back to Kuwait. I was able to write about Fawzi and Fayiz and their families from personal experience. But that was the last lap of a marathon run by the Family Committee and the Core Team, which shared with me their history over more than a decade of effort before I came on the scene – the victories, the defeats, and the sorrows of those years.
The Core Team and I were also able to spend invaluable time with five of the twelve men after their release. We talked at length about their lives before they were detained, their time at Guantanamo, and their efforts to regain what they had lost when they returned home years later to a very different place. This allowed the stories of those five to be told with greater richness and detail than those of some other detainees whose backgrounds came largely from US dossiers and hearings, many of which were filled with wildly improbable accounts pieced together from unreliable jailhouse informers or confessions coerced by torture. We also tried to understand the legacy of a Kuwaiti who lost his sanity and became a suicide bomber. This act surprised none of his fellow Kuwaiti detainees who witnessed his decline and could not understand why he was released while they remained.
The stories of the Guantanamo detainees are complicated and sometimes ambiguous. One of the reasons I was engaged was that I had done Guantanamo work for detainees from many countries over many years, and not all of my clients were necessarily innocent. The complete truth is often elusive, but the rule of law relies on evidence, not perfect insight. Sometimes, inconsistencies mask lies about fundamental issues; sometimes, they are just inconsistencies or confusion about details years after the fact.
I do not labor under the delusion that every one of my clients at Guantanamo told me the complete truth; no lawyer does. One of my clients, from the United Kingdom, was released early because Tony Blair was owed a favor by George Bush. He was a Jamaican-British convert to Islam who had been tortured by both the Taliban and the Americans. He spent more than a decade after his release living quietly as a web designer in Manchester with a wife and five kids. He was radicalized by mass killings of civilians in Syria, joined ISIS, and became a suicide bomber. It is hard to know why.
Sometimes, you feel that you can see into your clients’ hearts and minds; sometimes, they remain opaque. I have tried as objectively as possible, with sometimes limited information, to weigh the evidence, but I was also an advocate for some of these men; I spent time with their families. What is important is a process that seeks to get at the truth and that does not simply accept the government’s story at face value or that sweeps up hundreds of men and tortures them to try to find out what happened. Truth finding was not the process employed at Guantanamo.
The stories of the detainees from Kuwait are in many ways less ambiguous, less uncertain than those of other detainees. The Core Team had high confidence from their investigations that the Kuwaitis were innocent of terrorist acts. By and large, these men were middle or upper-middle class, most were highly educated, and many had successful careers. Those factors might not preclude terrorist sympathies, but they did not fit the expected profile. They lived with their families and had no history of radicalism in Kuwait, which is a pious but not extremist place. Many had well-established and documented histories of doing charitable work in poor Muslim countries long before September 11th. They had generally journeyed to Afghanistan or Pakistan before the US bombing of Afghanistan in October 2001. Once the US bombing began, they along with hundreds of others tried to flee the country, but they were handed over to US troops, frequently for bounties, and ultimately ended up at Guantanamo Bay.
Are there things about this group of detainees that are still not known? Did someone fire a weapon or support the Taliban against the Northern Alliance in the Afghan Civil War? It is likely in some cases. But it is also clear that none of these Kuwaitis had anything to do with the planning or execution of 9/11. Indeed, one of the great tragedies of Guantanamo, as we will see, was that the senior officers running the facility knew within the first few months that they had no high-level terrorists there and that most of the men (they were all men) should not have been there at all. Yet they were not released, and the abuse continued to feed a political narrative that the United States was capturing and interrogating “the worst of the worst.”
Detainees were released over the years in what appears to have been a haphazard or transactional manner, including over time ten of the twelve Kuwaitis. But Fayiz Al Kandari and Fawzi Al Odah, the last two, looked like they might remain forever. Indefinite detention without trial was a new development in American life, a precedent that remains in place as of this writing in autumn 2025. Their families and the Core Team that had worked for so long to release the other ten men were concerned that, at the end, their mission to bring all the boys home would fail and that Khalid Al Odah, who organized the Family Committee, would never see his son again.
This book is about these men and their families trapped in a Kafkaesque world where Muslim men were rounded up, overwhelmingly by Pakistani and Afghan bounty hunters, handed over to the United States, presumed to be terrorists, and treated as such, even after it became clear that the United States had not captured anyone of significant interest. They were caught up in a unique moment when a country had lost its bearings after September 11. It is a story that still has not ended for fifteen men still at Guantanamo at this writing, for men who spent years and, in many cases, decades at Guantanamo (the Biden administration finally released a sizable group just before leaving office). For those who remain, their fates are uncertain. For the eleven Kuwaitis who have survived, they are trying to rebuild their interrupted lives. The Kuwaitis were the lucky ones; they had a government that, after initial hostility and delay, pressed for their release and had the resources and diplomatic skill to secure it. Many men came from countries that were poor, unstable, or disengaged, and some of those men are still paying with their freedom for the deficiencies of their governments.
Nearly 800 men went through Guantanamo, only a handful of whom had any material role in terrorist acts, and the significant majority of whom were wholly innocent. To be clear, there are nine men who are so-called High Value Detainees, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who appear to have been involved with 9/11. But those men were held for years in “black prisons” outside the United States and were not brought to Guantanamo until 2006, more than four years after all the rest had been sent. Two of those men were convicted by military tribunals, one at trial and one through a plea, and are serving sentences. Of the remaining seven, six tried to plead guilty before the military tribunals in exchange for the dropping of the death penalty, but after two years of negotiation, the Biden administration reneged on the agreement, and the validity of the pleas is in the civilian courts. So, the current record after twenty-three years is 780 men tortured and abused, thousands of years served under harsh conditions, 765 released, two convictions, seven awaiting trial, and six men without charge, of whom three have been cleared for release (but no country will take them) and three have not. Statistics are hard to come by, but it is a good estimate that more than $13 billion has been spent in maintaining Guantanamo, and hundreds of millions per year are likely to continue to be spent for years if not decades into the future.
The legacy of Guantanamo goes beyond these statistics and the human costs behind them. Post-9/11 fear, political imperatives, and a legal system that proved largely incapable of preserving the rule of law in a critical time came together to create a perfect storm of cruelty and injustice for these many men. In many ways, they and we live in a world shaped by Guantanamo and that still projects its shadows. It is no coincidence that, at the time of this writing, Guantanamo is being used again to cycle through migrants labeled without evidence as criminals or terrorists. The “worst of the worst” narrative, in secrecy and without due process, continues today with migrants because fear is a powerful weapon against the rule of law.
This book provides an analysis of the unique legal history of Guantanamo, while also providing a detailed factual narrative regarding these men’s lives, and a first-person description of my experience as an advocate. It also reflects on the legal, political, and cultural legacy of Guantanamo, having had the opportunity to consider nearly a quarter century of the Guantanamo experience and the “Global War on Terror,” which is not yet over.
