WASHINGTON — The United States transferred six detainees from the Guantanamo Bay prison to Uruguay this weekend, the Defense Department announced Sunday. It was the largest single group of inmates to depart the wartime prison in Cuba since 2009, and the first detainees to be resettled in South America.
The transfers were made amid a renewed push by President Obama to close the prison.
The six men — four Syrians, a Tunisian, and a Palestinian — were detained as suspected militants with ties to Al Qaeda in 2002 but were never charged. They have long been cleared for release by an interagency task force but could not be sent home.
The administration has struggled to find countries willing to take detainees who are no longer considered to pose a threat. President José Mujica of Uruguay agreed this year to accept the six as a humanitarian gesture, but outgoing Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel had delayed in signing off on the arrangement.
Hagel's slow pace in approving proposed transfers of low-level detainees contributed to larger tensions with the White House before his resignation under pressure last month.
The departure of the six men reduces Guantanamo's inmate population to 136, of whom 67 are on the list of those approved for transfer if security conditions can be met. Most on the transfer list are Yemenis.
Among the six detainees was a Syrian man who has been on a prolonged hunger strike to protest his indefinite detention without trial, and who has brought a high-profile lawsuit to challenge the military's procedures for force-feeding him. His release may make most of that case moot.
Although Obama vowed in 2013 to revive his efforts to close the prison, the military had transferred just one low-level detainee in the first 10 months of this year. That transfer occurred in March.
But the bureaucratic logjam appears to be clearing: Since November, it has transferred 13 more. There have now been 30 transfers under Hagel's watch as defense secretary; by comparison, only four were transferred under his predecessor, Leon Panetta, who ran the Pentagon from July 2011 to February 2013.
Still, even if the military were to transfer all the other detainees recommended for such a move, some 69 detainees would remain. They are either facing charges before a military commission or deemed untriable but too dangerous to release.
The Obama administration hopes that if it can shrink the inmate population to two digits, Congress will revoke a law that bars the transfer of detainees into the United States. It would be far cheaper for taxpayers to house the inmates on domestic soil, and the White House argues that closing Guantanamo would eliminate a propaganda symbol for terrorists to use against the country.
But Republican lawmakers remain hostile to that plan. They argue that housing wartime prisoners on domestic soil would increase the risk of terrorist attacks inside the United States.
Each of the six detainees remained at Guantanamo because they come from home countries with troubled security conditions. The Uruguay deal was ready to go in March, but Hagel waited until July to notify Congress that he was approving the deal.
The next month, when the United States sent a plane to Guantanamo to bring the men out, Mujica balked, preferring to avoid the media spectacle of their arrival in the middle of an election campaign to choose his successor.
Then, Uruguay's presidential election went into a runoff, which was held Nov. 30. During the delay, administration officials insisted that the transfers would take place eventually.
Cliff Sloan, the State Department envoy who negotiates detainee transfers, expressed gratitude to Mujica in a statement. Several other South American countries, including Brazil, Chile, and Colombia, motivated by news of the Uruguay deal, had opened talks about potentially taking in some low-level detainees as well, but were watching to see what would happen.
Sloan noted that "this transfer is a major milestone in our efforts to close the facility."
Mujica, a former urban guerrilla who spent 14 years in prison in Uruguay, including more than a decade in solitary confinement, expressed critical views of Guantanamo in a televised interview over the weekend, saying some of the detentions represented a "miserable injustice.''
Mujica also emphasized that Uruguay would not place restrictions on the mobility of the six men, saying that their arrival with refugee status meant that "the first day they want to leave, they can go."
One Syrian transferred Sunday is Jihad Ahmed Mujstafa Diyab, who had been held for 12 years without a trial. He is the plaintiff in a suit challenging the military's procedures for dealing with hunger strikes, which include strapping detainees into a restraint chair and inserting tubes into their noses, through which liquid nutritional supplement is poured.
In October, a US District Court judge ruled that the military must make public videotapes of Diyab undergoing that procedure, in response to a petition by The New York Times and 15 other news organizations. The Obama administration has appealed that order, saying the release of the videos could inflame attacks against US troops abroad.
Under statutory transfer restrictions enacted by Congress, the secretary of defense must tell lawmakers at least 30 days before a transfer that the secretary has determined the release would be safe enough.
Hagel approved a flurry of transfers in late 2013, but in 2014 the process ground to a halt as he did not move on the Uruguay deal, nor on a proposal to repatriate four low-level Afghans and make other arrangements in the pipeline.
His reluctance to sign off on these agreements contributed to a deterioration in his relations with the White House. In May, Hagel said in an interview that he was in no hurry to approve deals. "I owe that to the American people, to ensure that any decision I make is, in my mind, responsible," he said.
Later that month, Hagel did transfer five high-level Taliban detainees to Qatar in an exchange for Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, America's only living prisoner of war from the conflict in Afghanistan. The deal angered lawmakers because Hagel did not follow the 30-day advance-notice law in that instance; the administration said that waiting 30 days after the deal for Bergdahl's release was struck would have endangered his life.