A detainee at Guantánamo Bay is escorted by guards. Photograph by John Moore / Getty

When Akhmed Abdul Qadir Hussain was eighteen (or a little younger, by some accounts), in early 2002, he was arrested by the Pakistani police, who gave him to American forces, who sent him to Guantánamo Bay. When he was about twenty-five, in 2009, the Guantánamo Review Task Force cleared him for release. It had taken seven years, but, as a Pentagon press release put it, “this man was unanimously approved for transfer by the six departments and agencies comprising the task force.” But he remained in Guantánamo for more than five additional years. Finally, on Wednesday, the Obama Administration announced that it had put Hussain on a plane to Estonia. He is not Estonian; he was born in Yemen. But now, at the age of about thirty-one, he will presumably learn at least the rudiments of the Estonian language, maybe while taking in the architecture in Talinn's old city and on the Baltic coast. Four other Guantánamo prisoners were sent to Oman; they were also Yemeni. Each of them had been held for a dozen years or more, and each had also been cleared for release five years earlier. Neither they nor Hussain had ever been charged with anything.

Congress is informed before such releases, which might explain why, the day before the announcement, Republican Senators John McCain, Kelly Ayotte, and Lindsey Graham came out with a proposal for new Guantánamo legislation. It was not an effort to find a way to prevent teen-agers from being locked up for no good reason until they are in their thirties. Instead, it called for what would effectively be a moratorium on any transfers from Guantánamo. Under the proposal, no prisoner could be transferred to Yemen (although there are dozens of Yemenis who have been cleared for release) because Yemen, according to Ayotte, is “the Wild West.” And for the next two years, no prisoner who had received a medium-risk or high-risk designation could be released at all—never mind if nothing had ever been proved against him.

The medium-risk designation seems to be pretty easy to get; until his case was finally reviewed, Hussain was called that, on the ground that he had spent time at a guest house associated with the Taliban, where, the government argued, he had been “trained” (in what, exactly, isn't really clear) and had access to a gun. In a 2008 assessment, he was also labelled as “a HIGH threat from a detention perspective,” because he had been “non-compliant and hostile to the guard force.” He hadn’t actually tried to attack anyone, but he had accumulated seventy-five disciplinary infractions, including “inappropriate use of bodily fluids,” with “the most recent occurring on 6 March 2008, when he refused to return a library book.”

Reading the paperwork, such as it is, that explains Hussain's detention, one is struck by how little anyone seems to have considered that he was a teen-ager, and perhaps a minor, when he was put in a jumpsuit in a prison camp. But he would not have been the only juvenile—or even the youngest prisoner—at Guantánamo. The United States’s blindness about child prisoners is not confined to terrorism suspects; far too many underage suspects are sentenced and incarcerated as adults. It was only last week that New York City officials decided to stop putting prisoners under the age of twenty-one in solitary confinement at Rikers Island. (See Jennifer Gonnerman's harrowing account of a childhood lost in that jail.) But not so many end up in Estonia.

This befuddlement seems to have extended to earlier reviews of Hussain’s case. When Judge Reggie B. Walton denied Hussain’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus, in 2011, he discounted Hussain’s account of what he had been doing in Pakistan and Afghanistan, in part because Hussain seemed suspiciously unrealistic about what kind of job he could get, clueless about the motives of the older men he was spending time with, aimless when it came to registering for school, and not in a hurry to go home and get married—this, again, when he was seventeen. (The blog Lawfare posted a link to the decision.) Hussain explained that he’d lingered in Lahore because when he looked for plane tickets home they’d seemed too expensive, with too many layovers, and he had wanted a cheaper, direct flight. The judge found this to be a “nonsensical” explanation, “given that the more layovers a traveler must experience to reach his or her final destination generally results in a less expensive ticket for the traveler.” Doesn't everyone know that?

When the judges on the D.C. Circuit Court heard an appeal of Walton’s denial, two years later, they upheld it, although Judge Harry T. Edwards, in his concurrence, at least sounded frustrated by where the “vagaries” of Guantánamo jurisprudence had led. “Is it really surprising that a teenager, or someone recounting his teenage years, sounds unbelievable? What is a judge to make of this, especially here, where there is not one iota of evidence that [he] ‘planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such . . . persons’?” (Linda Greenhouse wrote about the opinion a few weeks ago, before news of Hussain’s transfer.) Edwards said that he was “disquieted.” Other relevant words might involve shame.

President Barack Obama's first executive order, on January 22, 2009, called for the closing of Guantánamo. There are still a hundred and twenty-two prisoners there, fifty-four of whom have been cleared for release. Fewer than a dozen have any sort of prosecution pending against them. The cases that are in motion—some against dangerous, murderous people, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—have been bungled and delayed, far more so than they would have been if they had been brought in, say, the Southern District of New York, where the World Trade Center stood (and is now standing again). After a period of paralysis, during which the Administration appeared to have more or less thrown up its hands, the President is trying again, one plane ticket to Uruguay, or to the Baltic states, at a time.

The Republicans have been pushing back, citing the recent attacks in Paris, and talking about recidivism—although recidivist, with the implication of a return to a life of crime, is a strange thing to call a person whom you’ve never charged with a crime in the first place. According to the Times, the White House has a theory that if it can get the number of prisoners in Guantánamo down to between sixty and eighty, “keeping it open would make no economic sense”—as if it makes any economic sense now, at three million dollars per year, per prisoner. Does the White House’s strategy for closing Guantánamo involve Congress acting rationally? It will need a better plan than that.