THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

After all these years stuck in an illegal concentration camp, the prisoners of of Guantanamo will be facing the equivalent of a parole board hearing, including one fellow who was supposed to be a bad actor, Abu Zubaydah.

The Department of Defense has released an official list identifying 71 Guantanamo Bay prisoners who are eligible to receive parole-board-style hearings. The list includes a high-profile former CIA captive named Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded dozens of times.

Pentagon officials acknowledged last July that 71 prisoners qualified for parole board hearings, but they refused to identify who those prisoners were.

It’s unknown what criteria the Pentagon used to determine that Zubaydah, identified on the list as Zayn al-Ibidin Muhammed Husayn, qualified for a hearing before a Periodic Review Board, whose job is to assess whether “continued law of war detention is necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States."

Last year, Al Jazeera exclusively obtained six volumes of diaries Zubaydah wrote between 1990 and his capture in March 2002. The government-translated documents revealed that he helped accused members of Al-Qaeda escape from Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in 2001.

Attorneys for Zubaydah said they have not been notified about a hearing for the high-value prisoner, and it seems unlikely the panel of government officials who sit on the parole board would conclude that Zubaydah no longer poses a national-security threat to the U.S.

The unclassified two-page list was obtained by Al Jazeera in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed last July, immediately after a Defense Department official began notifying attorneys for some prisoners that parole hearings would begin in an effort to empty out Guantanamo and help President Barack Obama make good on his five-year-old promise to shutter the detention facility.

The list of potential parolees was released at a time of heightened secrecy at Guantanamo. In mid-December, prison officials announced they would no longer provide the media with the number of prisoners on hunger strike or those who have been designated for force-feeding. Moreover, the prison’s public affairs staff in January issued a stricter set of ground rules for journalists who tour the detention facility.

What’s notable about the parole list is that it is dated April 19, 2013, indicating that it was prepared at the height of — and perhaps in response to — a mass hunger strike at Guantanamo.

Just like "double secret probation", no one knows what the criteria or ground rules will be but since the idea is to ship off as many of the inconvenient prisoners as possible, we know that some will regain their freedom.