Abdel Hamid Ibn Abdussalem Ibn Mifta Al Ghazzawi

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Abdel Hamid Ibn Abdussalem Ibn Mifta Al Ghazzawi is a citizen of Libya held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba.^[1] Al Ghazzawi's Guantanamo detainee ID number is 654. The Department of Defense reports that Al Ghazzawi was born on August 11, 1962, in Tripoli, Libya.

[edit] Combatant Status Review Tribunal

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.

Al Ghazzawi's pro bono attorney, H. Candace Gorman, reports that Al Ghazzawi had two Combatant Status Review Tribunals.^[2] According to Gorman, when she acquired a copy of his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, she learned:

His first Tribunal unanimously determined there was no evidence that he had ever been an "enemy combatant".
A second Tribunal was convened in Washington DC, five weeks later, in the absence of Al Ghazzawi and his Personal Representative, which unanimously determined he was an "enemy combatant", based on secret evidence.
When Gorman visited the secure site where the attorneys of the Guantanamo detainees can review the classified evidence she found that his secure file did not contain any new evidence. All the documents in his classified file had already been made public. The only difference between the classified and unclassified versions was that names that had been redacted in the unclassified version, were in the clear in the classified version.

When captives participated in their Tribunals their transcripts were normally included among the body of documents that Department of Defense was under court order to release.