YouTube-aided detainee sent home to Sudan

The military has sent home from Guantánamo Bay a Sudanese hospital worker whose lawyers campaigned in cyberspace for his freedom, in part by enlisting television's West Wing president to make a YouTube video.

Adel Hamad, 49, was among 15 long-held detainees whose release was announced by the Defense Department Wednesday night. Thirteen captives went to lockups in Afghanistan and two were set free in Sudan.

The transfer lowered the prison camp population at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba to ''approximately 290,'' or below 300 for the first time since an airlift filled the crude open-air compound called Camp X-Ray on Feb. 15, 2002.

Hamad, a charity worker in Peshawar, Pakistan, claims he was wrongly captured by Pakistani security forces and handed over to U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2002. Thursday, he took part in a government-sponsored news conference in Khartoum, Sudan, to protest his five-year confinement.

But first, Hamad was reunited ''with his family by 5 a.m. Thursday, Khartoum time,'' according to Steve Wax, a federal public defender in Portland, Ore. Hamad met his youngest daughter, Rahmah, who was born while he was in detention.

''Even though Mr. Hamad is home, the fight for him to clear his name goes on,'' Wax said after speaking with his client by telephone. 'He told us, `I want justice.' ''

The Portland public defender's office turned the case of the father of four into a global cause célèbre by posting what it called the first-ever video habeas corpus petition on YouTube, the Internet video site.

The video, called Guantánamo Unclassified, showed one of Hamad's attorneys arguing his case in a homemade video filmed at the base, with the Caribbean in the background.

In March, left-wing activist and actor Martin Sheen joined the cause, appearing in a four-minute video vouching for Hamad in commentary that evoked his television persona as President Josiah Bartlett on the popular TV program The West Wing.

''No one should be detained without a court hearing just on the word of a president. Any president,'' Sheen said.

Hamad's attorneys say he was a humanitarian relief worker when Pakistani police took him from his bed in Peshawar in July 2002 and handed him off to U.S. forces across the border in Afghanistan.

Wax got the case in October 2005 and sent staff members to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sudan to gather affidavits vouching for their client's innocence and character -- and also campaigned with the Khartoum government for his repatriation, which took two years.

The Pentagon said this week's transfer illustrated U.S. willingness to review each captive's case ``while hostilities are ongoing -- an unprecedented step in the history of warfare.''

Lydia Vickers, a Tallahassee activist, was so touched by the cyber-campaign that she has donned an orange jumpsuit, hid hear face beneath a black hood and waved a sign bearing Hamad's internment serial number -- ISN 940 -- from a street corner opposite the Pentagon's Southern Command headquarters in South Florida to the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court.