User:Geo Swan/Guantanamo/articles about captives that aren't ready yet/Guantanamo captives documents

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See User:Geo Swan/Stale drafts Initially the Bush Presidency asserted that they did not have to release any of the Guantanamo captive's documents. They asserted that no captive apprehended in Afghanistan was entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention, and that those held in the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base were not protected by US law either, because it was not on US territory.

This position was widely criticized, and was challenged in the United States's Judicial System, with several cases eventually being heard before the Supreme Court of the United States. In Rasul v. Bush the Supreme Court over-ruled the Executive Branch, and clarified that US law did apply in Guantanamo. Guantanamo captives were entitled to mount challenges to their detention through writs of habeas corpus.

179 captives whose status was challenged through a writ of habeas corpus had the unclassified documents released under Freedom of Information Act requests. The Associated Press has filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests.

The Office for the Administrative Review of Detained Enemy Combatants
One of the results of the Rasul v. Bush ruling was the creation of the Office for the Administrative Review of Detained Enemy Combatants (OARDEC). OARDEC was responsible for the implementation of a one time Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) and annual Administrative Review Board (ARB) hearings.

The CSR Tribunals and ARB hearings structure was modeled after the Tribunals described in Army Regulation 190-8 (AR 190-9), but with different mandates.

The mandate of the AR 190-8 Trinbunals is to fulfill the USA's Geneva Convention obligation to give captives a "competent tribunal" -- authorized to make a determination as to whether the captive is a "privileged belligerent" entitled to the Conventions protections, an innocent civilian, who should be immediately released, or a combatant who has violated the laws of war. According to the Geneva Conventions only combatants who a competent tribunal, like the AR 190-8 Tribunals, has determined are combatants who have violated the laws of war can be tried for hostile acts.

The Bush Presidency's position is no captive apprehended in the "global war on terror" is entitled to a competent tribunal.

The CSR Tribunals mandate is to make a determination as to whether the Guantanamo captives had been correctly determined to have been "enemy combatants".

The ARBs mandate is to annually review each captive's case and make a recommendation as to whether the USA has a continuing reason to hold the captive.

507 of 558 Summary of Evidence memos released in 2005
In response to a FOIA request the Department of Defense from the Associated Press the Department of Defense released 507 or the 558 Summary of Evidence memos prepared for the captives' CSR Tribunals. The captives' names were redacted from the memos.

List of the captive's names, the transcripts from their Tribunals and hearings
The DoD challenged another FOIA request from AP, for a list of the captive's names, and the transcripts from their Tribunals. The DoD did not challenge this request on national security grounds. The DoD declined to release these documents, and based their refusal by arguing that they were concerned for protecting the captives' privacy.

In January 2006 US District Court Justice Jed Rakoff, the judge who was considering the Department of Defense's arguments dismissed the DoD's arguments, and gave the DoD a deadline of 6pm Friday, March 3 2006. The DoD did deliver a CD, with approximately 5,000 pages of documents, in 60 large portable document format files on March 3rd, but they didn't make the 6pm deadline. Even so they sent a military courier to retrieve the disk they had delivered late, and replace it with a more limited one.

The documents the DoD released were incomplete. While several dozen transcripts contained the captives names, because they had spelled them out, because they said their documents bore the wrong name, all the other documents were identified only by their Internee Security Number.

The DoD released updated versions of some of the original 60 pdf files, relased another 16 files containing transcripts from the first annual Administrative Review Board hearings. On April 20 2006 released a list of the names, nationalities and ISNs of the 558 captives whose cases were considered by CSR Tribunals.

This made it possible to tie the 500+ transcripts identified solely by an ISN with individual captives.

On May 15 2006 the DoD released a list of the names, nationalities, ISN, date of birth, and place of birth, of all the 759 captives who had been held in Guantanamo.

On September 6 2006 President Bush transferred 14 "high value detainees" who had been held in secret CIA black sites. They were the first transfers since Rasul v. Bush.

Another five new captives were transferred in the year that followed.