Said Bezan Ashek Shayban

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Said Bezan Ashek Shayban is a citizen of Saudi Arabia held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba.[1] Shayban's Guantanamo detainee ID number is 346. American intelligence analysts estimate that Shayban was born in 1981, in Ta'iz, Saudi Arabia.

Contents

[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.

[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 Shayban's detainee ID.[2] The allegations Shayban would have faced, during his Tribunal, were:

a. The detainee is associated with the Taliban.
  1. At the end of April of 2001, the detainee traveled to Afghanistan via Qatar, Bahrain, Karachi, Quetta, and Chaman, Pakistan.
  2. The detainee traveled to Afghanistan to join the Taliban and to fight against the Northern Alliance.
  3. The detainee was a member of a Taliban rifle squad equipped with AK-47s.
  4. A member of the same Taliban rifle squad has been identified as Abdul ((Khaliq)) [sic] .
  5. ################# is a Taliban leader and a commander of Afghani Military Forces [sic] (AMF).
  6. The detainee and eleven Afghanis spent six months protecting troop bunkers and holding a defensive line near Kabul, Afghanistan.
  7. The detainee stayed at a Taliban mosque in Chaman, Pakistan, for two months.
  8. The detainee left his defensive position near Kabul, Afghanistan, and fled to Pakistan.

[edit] Testimony

Shayban chose not to participate in his Combatant Status Review Tribunal.

[edit] References

  1. ^ list of prisoners (.pdf), US Department of Defense, May 15, 2006
  2. ^ Summary of Evidence prepared for Said Bezan Ashek Shayban - page 82. Combatant Status Review Tribunals (November 19, 2004). Retrieved on July 20, 2006.