Abdul Zahir (Guantanamo Bay detainee 753) Abdul Zahir (Guantanamo Bay detainee 753) Abdul Zahir (عبدالظاهر) is a citizen of Afghanistan currently held in extrajudicial detention in the United States' Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. He was the tenth captive, and the first Afghan, to face charges before the first Presidentially authorized Guantanamo military commissions. After the Supreme Court ruled that the President lacked the constitutional authority to set up military commissions, the United States Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, he was not charged under that system. Zahir was approved for transfer on July 11, 2016. On January 17, 2017, four days before
Guantanamo Bay detention camp the Guantánamo Bay prison as "the gulag of our times," breaking an internal AI policy on not comparing different human rights abuses. The report reflected ongoing claims of prisoner abuse at Guantánamo and other military prisons. The comparison between the Gulag and Guantanamo Bay has been criticized by a number of people, including John Podhoretz, who on the difference between Guantanamo and a Soviet gulag, said, "Maybe the people who work at Amnesty International really do think that the imprisonment of 600 certain or suspected terrorists is tantamount to the imprisonment of 25 million slaves." Former Soviet-era "gulag" prisoner, Pavel