Tariq al-Sawah

Al-Sawah was released in January 2016 after Bosnia and Herzegovina had expressed willingness to accept him, and was flown there the same day.

When he assumed office in January 2009 President Barack Obama made a number of promises about the future of Guantanamo. He promised the use of torture would cease at the camp. He promised to institute a new review system. That new review system was composed of officials from six departments, where the OARDEC reviews were conducted entirely by the Department of Defense. When it reported back, a year later, the Joint Review Task Force classified some individuals as too dangerous to be transferred from Guantanamo, even though there was no evidence to justify laying charges against them. On April 9, 2013, that document was made public after a Freedom of Information Act request. Tariq Mahmoud Ahmed Al Sawah was one of the 71 individuals deemed too innocent to charge, but too dangerous to release. Although Obama promised that those deemed too innocent to charge, but too dangerous to release would start to receive reviews from a Periodic Review Board less than a quarter of men have received a review.

In March 2013 the Egypt Independent reported that Tariq's lawyers had arranged for Dr. Sondra Crosby, an associate professor of medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine and Public Health, to examine him on two occasions. A letter from Crosby to camp authorities describes his health as at serious risk, due to his morbid obesity. Nevertheless, camp authorities decline to offer him any special treatment, or even to release his medical records.

He was charged with war crimes, but those charges were dismissed on March 1, 2012. According to the Egypt Independent formerly secret documents, drafted by Joint Task Force Guantanamo, and published by the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks in 2011, contradicted the charges al-Sawah had faced.

In August 2012 Al Sawah was the last Egyptian captive in Guantanamo.

These charges were later dismissed on March 1, 2012.

On April 25, 2011, whistleblower organization WikiLeaks published formerly secret assessments drafted by Joint Task Force Guantanamo analysts. Joint Task Force Guantanamo drafted a fourteen-page assessment of al Sawah, dated September 30, 2008. The memo was signed by camp commandant David M. Thomas Jr. and recommended his "Transfer Out of DOD Control."

Scholars at the Brookings Institution, led by Benjamin Wittes, listed the captives still held in Guantanamo in December 2008, according to whether their detention was justified by certain common allegations:

On December 16, 2008 Carol Rosenberg, writing in the Miami Herald, reported that the Guantanamo military commission prosecutors announced charges had been laid against Tarek el Sawah.

Al Sawah had a writ of habeas corpus filed on his behalf in June 2005.

Originally the Bush Presidency asserted that captives apprehended in the "war on terror" were not covered by the Geneva Conventions, and could be held indefinitely, without charge, and without an open and transparent review of the justifications for their detention. In 2004 the United States Supreme Court ruled, in Rasul v. Bush, that Guantanamo captives were entitled to being informed of the allegations justifying their detention, and were entitled to try to refute them.

Tariq Mahmoud Ahmed Al Sawah is a citizen of Egypt who was held in the United States Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba, from May 2002 to January 2016.

Tariq Mahmoud Ahmed al Sawah arrived at the Guantanamo detention camps on May 5, 2002, and was held there for 5008 days, until January 20, 2016.

The Long War Journal reported that al Sawah joined the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in 1981. They reported that he was rounded up in the large round-up of Muslim Brotherhood members following the assassination of Anwar Sadat. The Long War Journal also reported that Al Sawah, was a very skilled bomb-maker, who had been trained by Mushin Musa Matwalli Atwah, the bomb-maker who developed the bomb used against the USS Cole (DDG-67) . They reported he had invented an early model of shoe-bomb in the summer of 2001 and that he developed new models of magnetic limpet-mines.