Mahrar Rafat Al Quwari

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mahrar Rafat Al Quwari is a citizen of the West Bank, held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, in Cuba.^[1] Al Quwari's Guantanamo detainee ID number is 519. The Department of Defense reports that Al Quwari was born on February 18, 1965, in Gaza, Palestine.

1 Combatant Status Review Tribunal
2 References

[edit] Combatant Status Review Tribunal

Combatant Status Review Tribunals were held in a trailer the size of a large RV. The captive sat on a plastic garden chair, with his hands and feet shackled to a bolt in the floor.^[2]^[3] Three chairs were reserved for members of the press, but only 37 of the 574 Tribunals were observed.^[4]

The neutrality of this section is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.(December 2007)
Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved.

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 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. 169 of the memos bear a hand-written notation specifying the detainee's ID number. One of the memos had a notation specifying Al Quwari's detainee ID.^[5]

The allegations Al Quwari would have faced, during his Tribunal, were:

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

The detainee left Mashad ^[^sic] , Iran and headed to Afghanistan seven to eight days before the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.
While at the al Farouq training camp in Afghanistan, the detainee was in charge of delivering food to caves.
When Jalalabad was overrun by the Northern Alliance, the detainee fled into the Tora Bora mountain region.
The detainee admits that he was at the Tora Bora camp and was responsible for distributing supplies from the central supply point.
The detainee was trying to get to Pakistan and was captured by Norther Alliance forces as he fled Tora Bora, through Wazir Village ^[^sic] and on the way to Jalalabad.

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

The detainee trained in hand weapons at al Farouq and later fought at Kandahar.
The detainee was at Tora Bora and had responsibility for distributing food and weapons supplies to Taliban and al Qaida soldiers throughout the Tora Bora area, and he often met with and talked on the radio with Usama Bin Laden.