Fayiz Ahmad Yahia Suleiman

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Fayiz Ahmad Yahia Suleiman is a citizen of Yemen held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba.^[1] His Guantanamo detainee ID number is 153. American intelligence analysts estimate Suleiman was born in 1974 in Jeddan, 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 his 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 Suleiman'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. Originally from ############### the detainee traveled to Jalalabad, Afghanistan via Hudaida, Yemen; Sana ^[sic] Yemen; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Karachi , Pakistan; Quetta, Pakistan; and Kabul, Afghanistan.
2. The detainee worked for a suspect al Qaida operative in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
3. The detainee trained in Khandahar ^[sic], Afghanistan to poisons ^[sic].
4. Two of the detainee's aliases are listed in a document recovered from a safehouse raid associated with suspected al Qaida members in Karachi, Pakistan.

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

1. The detainee was a member of an Arab fighting group against the Northern Alliance in Talaqoun.
2. The detainee was a nurse at Talaquon while fighting the Northern Alliance and was at Tora Bora before trying to cross the border into Pakistan.
3. The detainee was arrested in December 2001, by Pakistani authorities attempting to cross the border from Afghanistan with other Arabs.

[edit] Testimony

There is no record that Suleiman chose to participate in his Combatant Status Review Tribunal.

[edit] References

1. ^ list of prisoners (.pdf), US Department of Defense, May 15, 2006
2. ^ CSRT Summary of Evidence memoranda (.pdf) prepared for Fayiz Ahmad Yahia Suleiman's Combatant Status Review Tribunals - October 12, 2004 - page 143