Mohammed Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani

Mohammed Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani

Rabbini's official ID photo, showing him wearing the white uniform issued to "compliant
Born 1970 (age 44–45)
Medina, Saudi Arabia
Arrested September 2002
Karachi, Pakistan
Detained at "the salt pit"
Guantanamo
ISN 1461
Status Still held in Guantanamo

Mohammed Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani is a citizen of Pakistan currently held by the United States military at Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.[1]

American Intelligence analysts estimated that Rabbani was born in 1970, in al Medinah, Saudi Arabia.

As of July 25, 2011, Mohammed Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani has been held at Guantanamo for six years 10 months. Before that he had been detained at least a year in secret CIA black site prisons.[2]

Background

Rabbani was born in Saudi Arabia to a Pakistani family who migrated to Karachi from India during the partition in 1947. He learned to speak Arabic while growing up in Saudi Arabia. Rabbani eventually moved back to Karachi where he worked as a taxi driver during the 1990s.[3] Due to his fluency in Arabic, his clientele included Arabs visiting the city, and he became a referred driver and guide for them. He married in 2001 and had a son, whom he has never seen and only came to learn of during custody, when his son was six years old.[3] Rabbani has written that he was handed over to American authorities because his crime was that he "spoke Arabic" and that he was accused of being one of them. He has also written on the torture he has endured during captivity in Afghanistan and Guantanamo.[4]

CIA black site detention

According to Laid Saidi, Rabbani, and his brother, Abdul Al-Rahim Ghulam Rabbani, were being held in the CIA black site known as "the salt pit" at the same time as him.[1]

Official status reviews

Originally, the Bush Presidency asserted that captives apprehended in the "war on terror" were not protected by the Geneva Conventions, and could be held indefinitely, without explanation. However, in 2004, the United States Supreme Court ruled, in Rasul v. Bush, that the captives were entitled to hear the allegations that justified their detention, and to try to refute those allegations.

Office for the Administrative Review of Detained Enemy Combatants

In 2004, in response to the Supreme Court's ruling in Rasul v. Bush, the Department of Defense set up the Office for the Administrative Review of Detained Enemy Combatants. Documents from those reviews were published in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.

Scholars at the Brookings Institution, led by Benjamin Wittes, listed the captives still held in Guantanamo in December 2008, according to whether their detention was justified by certain common allegations:[5]

Habeas petition

A habeas petition was submitted on Rabbani's behalf to US District Court Judge Ricardo M. Urbina.[6] In response, on December 14, 2005 the Department of Defense published a thirteen-page dossier of unclassified documents arising from his Combatant Status Review Tribunal.

His Summary of Evidence memo was drafted on November 9, 2004.[6]

The documents indicate a Lieutenant Commander, his Personal Representative, recorded on the detainee election form that they met, for eighty minutes, on 13 November 2004, to discuss his upcoming Tribunal.[6] His Personal Representative's notes state simply that he chose not to attend his Tribunal.

Tribunal Panel 21 convened 17 November 2004 and confirmed his "enemy combatant status". The decision memo drafted by the Tribunal states it reached this conclusion based on classified evidence.[6] His brother's status was also confirmed by Tribunal panel 21, on 23 November 2004. The notes in his case state his Tribunal did not convene in Guantanamo.

His name is also spelled as "Mohammed Ahmed Ghulam Rabbani", and his brother also as "Abd Al Rahim Ghulam Rabbani" in the document.[6]

Formerly secret Joint Task Force Guantanamo assessment

[7][8][9] His assessment was eleven pages long, and recommended his continued detention.[10] It was signed by camp commandant David M. Thomas Jr. and was dated May 28, 2008.

Hunger strike

Rabbani and his brother participated in the hunger strike that started on August 8, 2005.[11]

Named by the US Senate as one of the CIA's captives subjected to torture, without authorization

On December 9, 2014, the United States Senate Intelligence Committee published the 600 page unclassified summary of a 6,000 page report on the CIA's use of torture.[12] While some of the CIA's captives were identified as only been subjected to torture that had been authorized from Washington, other captives, like Rabbani, were identified as having been tortured by CIA officials who did not have authorization. According to the Intelligence Committee, Rabbani "Subjected to forced standing, attention grasps, and cold temperatures without blankets in November 2002."

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Algerian Tells of Dark Term in U.S. Hands, New York Times, July 7, 2006 - mirror
  2. ↑ "Mohammed Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani - The Guantánamo Docket". The New York Times.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Akbar, Mirza Shahzad (16 February 2015). "Will the PM fight for Pakistanis in Guantanamo?". Express Tribune. Retrieved 17 February 2015.
  4. ↑ Rabbani, Ahmad (11 December 2014). "A Pakistani writes from inside Guantanamo". Express Tribune. Retrieved 17 February 2015.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 Benjamin Wittes, Zaathira Wyne (2008-12-16). "The Current Detainee Population of Guantánamo: An Empirical Study" (PDF). The Brookings Institution. Retrieved 2010-02-16. mirror
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 "Mohammed Ahmed Ghulam Rabbani v. George W. Bush -- Civil Action No. 05-1607 (RMU)" (PDF). United States Department of Defense. 2005-12-14. pp. pages 68–80. Retrieved 2008-08-18.
  7. ↑ Christopher Hope, Robert Winnett, Holly Watt, Heidi Blake (2011-04-27). "WikiLeaks: Guantanamo Bay terrorist secrets revealed -- Guantanamo Bay has been used to incarcerate dozens of terrorists who have admitted plotting terrifying attacks against the West – while imprisoning more than 150 totally innocent people, top-secret files disclose". The Telegraph (UK). Archived from the original on 2012-07-13. Retrieved 2012-07-13. The Daily Telegraph, along with other newspapers including The Washington Post, today exposes America’s own analysis of almost ten years of controversial interrogations on the world’s most dangerous terrorists. This newspaper has been shown thousands of pages of top-secret files obtained by the WikiLeaks website.
  8. ↑ "WikiLeaks: The Guantánamo files database". The Telegraph (UK). 2011-04-27. Retrieved 2012-07-10.
  9. ↑ "Guantanamo Bay detainee file on Ahmed Ghulam Rabbani, US9PK-001461DP, passed to the Telegraph by Wikileaks". The Telegraph (UK). 2011-04-27. Retrieved 2012-07-14.
  10. ↑ David M. Thomas Jr. (2008-05-28). "Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD) for Guantanamo Detainee, ISN US9PK001461DP" (PDF). Joint Task Force Guantanamo. Retrieved 2012-07-14. Media related to File:ISN 01461, Mohammed Ahmad Rabbani's Guantanamo detainee assessment.pdf at Wikimedia Commons
  11. ↑ John Holland, Anna Cayton-Holland (2005-11-13). "Justice detained at Guantanamo? Prisoners held in long legal limbo". Denver Post. Archived from the original on 2005-11-26. Retrieved 2014-12-10. Recently, many prisoners have begun a hunger strike - including two of our clients, Aziz and Ahmed Ghulam Rabbani from Pakistan. Rabbani, who has lost a great deal of weight, recently broke his 35-day hunger strike to honor Ramadan. He was joined in his strike by Aziz and hundreds of other detainees. Now that Ramadan has ended, it is anticipated that the hunger strikes will resume with full force.
  12. ↑ Emma Roller, Rebecca Nelson (2014-12-10). "What CIA Interrogators Did To 17 Detainees Without Approval". National Journal. Archived from the original on 2014-12-11. Retrieved 2014-12-10. You probably haven't heard many of these names before. But they are important, both in terms of the terrorist plots they either planned or executed, and in how the U.S. government treated them once they became prisoners, according to the newly released Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report.

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