Sultan Ahmed Dirdeer Musa Al Uwaydha

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Sultan Ahmed Dirdeer Musa Al Uwaydha is a citizen of Saudi Arabia held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba.^[1] His Guantanamo detainee ID number is 59. The Department of Defense reports that he was born on December 4, 1975, in Medina, Saudi Arabia.

[edit] Combatant Status Review Tribunal

Combatant Status Review Tribunals were held in a small trailer, the same width, but shorter, than a mobile home. The Tribunal's President sat in the big chair. The detainee sat with their hands and feet shackled to a bolt in the floor in the white, plastic garden chair. A one way mirror behind the Tribunal President allowed observers to observe clandestinely. In theory the open sessions of the Tribunals were open to the press. Three chairs were reserved for them. In practice the Tribunal only intermittently told the press that Tribunals were being held. And when they did they kept the detainee's identities secret. In practice almost all Tribunals went unobserved.

Initially the Bush administration asserted that they could withhold all the protections of the Geneva Conventions to captives from the war on terror. This policy was challenged before the Judicial branch. Critics argued that the USA could not evade its obligation to conduct a competent tribunals to determine whether captives are, or are not, entitled to the protections of prisoner of war status.

Subsequently the Department of Defense instituted the Combatant Status Review Tribunals. The Tribunals, however, were not authorized to determine whether the captives were lawful combatants -- rather they were merely empowered to make a recommendation as to whether the captive had previously been correctly determined to match the Bush administration's definition of an enemy combatant.

[edit] Allegations

During the winter and spring of 2005 the Department of Defense complied with a Freedom of Information Act request, and released five files that contained 507 memoranda which each summarized the allegations against a single detainee. These memos, entitled "Summary of Evidence" were prepared for the detainee's Combatant Status Review Tribunals. The detainee's names and ID numbers were redacted from all but one of these memos, when they were first released in 2005. But some of them contain notations in pen. Approximately four dozen of the memos have a notation specifying the detainee's ID number. One of the memos had a notation, in pen, specifying Al Uwaydha's detainee ID.^[2] The allegations he would have faced, during his Tribunal, were:

a. The detainee is associated with al Qaida and the Taliban:

1. The detainee was visited [sic] Usama Bin Laden's home.
2. The detainee was a bodyguard for Usama Bin Laden.
3. The detainee's name along with other personal property information was found was [sic] on a list contained in a captured hard drive associated with a senior al Qaida member.
4. Detainee's name and contents of his trust accounts were found on a list of al Qaida mujahideen located on computer media captured during raids against al Qaida associated safe houses in Pakistan.

b. The detainee participated in military operations against the United States and its coalition partners.

1. The detainee assembled and sighted anti-aircraft guns.
2. The detainee was identified as having repaired weapons.
3. The detainee was identified in Tora Bora and left the region with 30 other suspected al Qaida members.
4. The detainee was captured while trying to cross into Pakistan from Afghanistan on 15 December 2001 with 30 other suspected al Qaida members.

[edit] References

1. ^ list of prisoners (.pdf), US Department of Defense, May 15, 2006
2. ^ CSRT Summary of Evidence memoranda (.pdf) released in March 2005, Combatant Status Review Tribunals - October 20, 2004 - page 110