Guantanamo Bay Detainees Captured On The Battlefield - Details About The Circumstances of The Captures

Details About The Circumstances of The Captures

At first the Bush administration policy was to keep all the details of the circumstances of the capture, and even the identity of most of the captives the United States had taken in it war on terror were considered national security secrets, and were kept classified.

However, in July 2004 the habeas corpus case Rasul v. Bush reached the United States Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled that the Executive Branch had to provide the captives with an opportunity to hear and contest the allegations against them. They specified that the opportunity should be modeled after the Tribunals the military usually uses to distinguish between captives who were civilian refugees, and "lawful combatants", and combatants who had breached the criteria in Article four of the Third Geneva Convention, thus stripping themselves from the protections of "Prisoner of War" status.

The Department of Defense complied with a Freedom of Information Act request, and released the Summary of Evidence memos that listed the allegations against the captives. The names and ID numbers were redacted from these memoranda. But a team of legal scholars at Seton Hall University conducted a statistical analysis of the allegations against the captives. As of March 2007 the legal team has published 5 papers based on their analysis. One of their most noteworthy and controversial conclusions is that the portion of the allegations section set aside for "hostile activity" was empty for 55% of the captives.

On March 3, 2006 the Department of Defense complied with a court order, and was forced to release the transcripts of the unclassified sessions of the captives who had participated in their Tribunals.