Adel Noori

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Adel Noori is a Chinese citizen held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, in Cuba.^[1] His detainee ID number is 584.

Noori is one of approximately two dozen detainees from the Uighur ethnic group.^[2]

Main article: Uighur detainees in Guantanamo

1 Combatant Status Review Tribunal
2 References

[edit] Combatant Status Review Tribunal

Combatant Status Review Tribunal notice read to a Guantanamo captive. During the period July 2004 through March 2005 a Combatant Status Review Tribunal was convened to make a determination whether they had been correctly classified as an "enemy combatant". Participation was optional. The Department of Defense reports that 317 of the 558 captives who remained in Guantanamo, in military custody, attended their Tribunals.

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 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 Tribunal. 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.

To comply with a Freedom of Information Act request, during the winter and spring of 2005, the Department of Defense released 507 memoranda. Those 507 memoranda each contained the allegations against a single detainee, prepared for their Combatant Status Review Tribunals. The detainee's name and ID numbers were redacted from all but one of the memoranda. However 169 of the memoranda had the detainee's ID hand-written on the top right hand of the first page corner. When the Department of Defense complied with a court order, and released official lists of the detainee's names and ID numbers it was possible to identify who those 169 were written about. Adel Noori was one of those 169 detainees.^[3]

[edit] Allegations

a. The detainee is a member of al Qaeda:

The detainee traveled to Afghanistan via Kyrgyzstan to receive training at a Uighur training camp/safe house in Kabul.
The detainee arrived in Kabul on 26 July 2001 to begin training.
The detainee received training on the AK-47 rifle and a Makarov pistol while at the Kabul Uighur training camp/safe house.
When the bombing began in Kabul, the detainee and all of the Uighurs ran in all directions for safety.
The detainee fled to Pakistan where he and three others were arrested by the Pakistani police while trying to evade detection (dressed in burkas).

[edit] Transcript

Noori chose to participate in his Combatant Status Review Tribunal.^[4]

[edit] Testimony

Noori denied being a member of al Qaida or the Taliban.
He said East Turkistan was his home country, not China.
He said he saw weapons in the house where he stayed, but he didn’t receive any training - he said it was just a small house, not a training camp.
He acknowledged that he and fellow Uighurs had fled in all directions when the bombing began.
He said he threw his burka away before he was captured.

[edit] Noori's status

Some of the Chinese citizens from the Uighur ethnic group, detained in Guantanamo, were ruled to not have been enemy combatants after all. As of April 20, 2006 U.S. officials have not stated Noori's status.