User:Geo Swan/working/Official DoD release of Guantanamo detainees identities

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The United States Department of Defense tried to keep secret the identities of those held in its Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba.

History[edit]

winter/spring 2005
  • The Department of Defense released a series of portable document format files over the winter and spring of 2005. Those files contain 507 of the Summary of Evidence memos prepared for the Combatant Status Review Tribunals held from August 2004 through January 2005.
  • It appears that there should have been a sixth file, that was not released.
  • All but one of these files had the captive's name, and ID number redacted. However, 169 of the memos in the file released in March 2005 bear hand-written numbers in the upper right hand corner. And those hand-written numbers, when compared with the allegations that were read aloud, and recorded in the transcripts that were released a year later, show that these hand-written numbers are the ID numbers.
March 3, 2006
  • Legal appeals and counter-appeals dragged out the process, but, eventually, the DoD exhausted all it legal routes of appeal, and US District Court Justice Jed Rakoff's court order imposed a deadline of 6pm March 3, 2006.
  • According to AP's the DoD missed this deadline by 20 minutes, even with its first release. According to AP a Pentagon lawyer delivered a CD to the Associated Press.[1] Then, minutes later, an officer from the DoD returned to seize the original CD. It was replaced over an hour later with one that did not contain the letters from relatives of some of the prisoners that were unintentionally put on the previous version.
CSRT transcripts
  • 53 portable document format files containing 317 transcripts from those Guantanamo detainees who participated in their Tribunals.
  • None of the transcripts have had the detainees names added. In a limited number of detainee's transcripts the detainee, or the officers, bring up the detainee's names.
  • Almost all the detainee's transcripts have a detainee stamped in the lower right hand corner of each page. But the DoD did not release a list of detainee names and ID number until April 20, 2006.
ARB transcripts
  • 3 portable document format files containing a limited number of transcripts from Administrative Review Board hearing transcripts. Over the next seven weeks the DoD releases 14 more pdf files bringing the number of ARB hearing transcripts to 178.
  • As with the CSRT transcripts none of the ARB transcripts were titled with the detainee's names, although the detainee or the officers mentioned his name in a limited number of cases.
Summary of Evidence (ARB) memos
  • 3 portable document format files containing 121 memos, prepared for detainee's Administrative Review Boards, that summarized the factors for and against the detainee's continued detention.
  • Unlike the transcripts the detainee's ID numbers have been redacted in the memos. The memos do, however, eacho contain the name of a detainee.
April 20, 2006
  1. The detainee's Guantanamo detainee ID number - their ISN.
  2. The name the detainee is officially known by. Approximately a dozen names are too long and are truncated.
  3. The detainee's nationality.
  • Like the earlier documents, this document is not in a machine-readable form.
  • It became possible to correlate each transcript to the detainee it was about, by their name.
  • Close to half of the official names used in the factors memos don't match the official names used in the April 20th list, even though less than a year has passed since the memos were written.
May 15, 2006
  • The DoD releases a 20 page portable document format file that contains 759 entries.
  • The DoD says that this list names all the detainees who had ever been held in Guantanamo -- in military custody.
  • Even though less than four weeks have passed since the earlier list was released approximately 10-20 percent of the detainee's names were spelled inconsistently on the two lists.
  • Dozens of Guantanamo detainees, whose release has been described in the press are not listed on the official lists.

References[edit]

  1. ^ "U.S. reveals details on Guantanamo detainees after AP FOIA lawsuit". Associated Press. March 7, 2006. Retrieved April 22, 2007.