Pentagon Releases Detainee Held at Guantánamo Since Day 1

The Pentagon on Monday repatriated a Tunisian detainee who was brought to the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the day it opened, was never charged at the war court and was approved for transfer more than a decade ago.

Ridah Bin Saleh al Yazidi, 59, spent years languishing at the wartime prison because deals could not be made to repatriate or resettle him.

He was airlifted from the base in a secret operation that was completed 11 months after the Defense Department notified Congress that it had reached an agreement to return him to Tunisian custody, the Pentagon said. It offered no details on the security arrangements surrounding his return.

Mr. Yazidi’s transfer was the fourth in two weeks in a late Biden administration push to reduce the detainee population at the prison, which held 40 prisoners when President Biden took office. His departure left 26 detainees, 14 of them approved for transfer to other countries with diplomatic and security arrangements.

Another nine are in pretrial proceedings or convicted of war crimes, meaning the White House will once again fail to achieve President Barack Obama’s ambition of closing the prison. As the prison enters its 24th year in January, its mission has become more focused on discrete military trials than the prisoner-of-war-style operation that held and interrogated hundreds of wartime detainees in the early years.

Mr. Yazidi was the last of a dozen Tunisians once held at the prison, most of whom were captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan after the Sept. 11 attacks and brought to Guantánamo Bay as terrorism suspects.