User:Geo Swan/Guantanamo/Lists of Guantanamo Bay captives

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There have been multiple lists of Guantanamo Bay captives.

In the first years, from 2002 through early 2006, the United States Department of Defense strongly resisted public pressure to disclose the identities of the captives held in extrajudicial detention in its Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. Several individuals and individuals tried to use press reports and press releases to build unofficial lists of the captives' names.

The Associated Press started a series of Freedom of Information Act requests, for the captives' identities, and other information. The Department of Defense, in its decision to decline to offer the Freedom of Information Act request based its decision on the claim that it was protecting the captives' privacy. US District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff ruled, in January 2006, that the captives had no reasonable expectation of privacy. He also challenged the suggestion that keeping their identities confidential was in their interests. He gave the Department of Defense until 6pm Friday March 3 2006 to hand over a list of the captives' identities, and documents from the captives' Combatant Status Review Tribunals, from 2004, and their first annual Administrative Review Board hearings, from 2005.

The Department of Defense did deliver a CDROM to the Associated Press on March 3 2006, missing the 6pm deadline. The Department of Defense did not publish its first two lists of the captives' names until April 20 2006 and May 15 2006. These were the first two of close to a dozen official lists, which spelled the captives' names inconsistently.

Unofficial lists, prior to May 15 2006
Cageprisoners.com, a nongovernmental organization based in the United Kingdom, and the Washington Post were two institutions which devoted considerable efforts to collating information published about the captives to build unofficial lists of the captives' identities. They were able to add names to the lists when captives were released from Guantanamo, or transferred to the custody of their home countries, or when captives' families who received letters from captives went public with the contents, or the rare press release, from the Bush Presidency. Some released captives were able to name other captives who remained in captivity.

In theory captives were allowed to sent mail from Guantanamo. Nevertheless many captives reported that they believed none of their mail had been allowed out, because they never received any replies.

Official lists of April 20 2006 and May 15 2006
The April 20 2006 list included 558 names, said to include every captive who had a Combatant Status Review Tribunal convened to confirm their status. It was a portable document format file, packaged as the images of fourteen pages printed from a spreadsheet. It was not in machine readable form. A dozen names were truncated. All the names had been inappropriately shoehorned into the European form were all personal names were presumed to have an inherited last-name/surname. It had two other fields, the captives "internment serial number", and their country of citizenship.

The 6000 pages of documents published on March 3 2006 did not include the captives' names. They only listed the documents by the captives' "internment serial numbers".

The May 15 2006 list, a twenty-page representation of the information in a different spreadsheet, was in machine readable form. It too inappropriated shoehorned the names into a