Pentagon Releases Detainees' Names
About 315 From Guantanamo Identified

By Josh White and Julie Tate
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 4, 2006; A07



Defense Department officials yesterday released the names and personal information of about 315 current and former detainees of the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military prison, publicly disclosing that information for the first time since the facility opened in early 2002.

The names, released under an order from a federal judge, were contained in more than 5,000 pages of documents that detail administrative hearings for the detainees held at the island prison to determine whether they should be classified as enemy combatants.

The release came about a week after the Bush administration decided not to appeal the court order to provide uncensored versions of documents that had been turned over to the Associated Press as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The new documents do not include the small black boxes that had obscured references to individual detainees and information about their families and home countries.

The documents include summaries from the hearings and describe -- sometimes in graphic detail -- the personal accounts of how detainees were taken into custody. The detainees offer sometimes lengthy explanations for their alleged association with terrorist groups and the Taliban.

One detainee, identified in the documents as Ali Abdul Motalib Hassan al-Tayeea, said he was born in Iraq, suffered under Saddam Hussein and at one point was imprisoned because he was a Shiite Muslim. He told a tribunal in Cuba that he joined the Taliban in Afghanistan as a driver 20 days before Sept. 11, 2001, because he needed work.

"I have never been an enemy of America. I'd like to be a United States person. I'd like to be an American person," Tayeea said, declaring that he hates the Taliban and al-Qaeda. "If I saw Usama Bin Laden, I'd kill him."

"By God, I promise you, I was never an enemy of America," said Tayeea, who was identified for the first time in the records released last night. "I was just like a little scared mouse. If I had known the Taliban was against America, I wouldn't have gone."

Pentagon officials delivered the documents to the Associated Press yesterday evening, and copies were being distributed to other news organizations last night.

About 490 detainees are held at Guantanamo Bay. About 270 have been transferred or released.

The Washington Post has independently verified the identities of approximately 450 current and former detainees through international press accounts, interviews with lawyers who represent detainees and papers filed in several U.S. federal courts. The Post's entire catalogue of names and nationalities has been on its Web site since May 2004 and has been regularly updated. That list can be viewed at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/natio..._detainees.html .

Pentagon officials have long declined to provide any information about individual detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. Most information about specific detainees and their circumstances has come to light through dozens of habeas corpus cases filed in U.S. federal courts. Lawyers representing the detainees have met with their clients at the island base and have subsequently provided declassified notes and descriptions of their conversations to reporters, and military officials have filed sworn statements as part of Justice Department responses in the cases.

Not all detainees have participated in the enemy-combatant hearings. Identities and details of several hundred current and former Guantanamo Bay detainees who did not have hearings will remain undisclosed, Pentagon officials said.

"There is a concern that there could be potential harm to the detainees if personal information such as their name was a matter of public record," Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said, according to Reuters.

Human rights advocates said yesterday that the official Pentagon release of names is an important step because it provides an additional level of transparency at Guantanamo Bay, where hundreds of detainees have been held for years without criminal charges.

Amnesty International hopes to use the names and personal information to link detainees with their families, something the International Committee of the Red Cross already has been doing, said Curt Goering, deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA. "It's an important step because it's a bit of additional information, and it's information that families and many organizations have been demanding from the start," Goering said.

Also yesterday, a federal judge in Washington ordered the government to respond to a habeas corpus petition filed on behalf of Guantanamo Bay detainees. It was the first time a federal judge has issued such an order since the government asserted that a new law limits the captives' access to federal courts, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights. Justice Department lawyers had sought dismissal of all pending detainee cases after the law was signed, and numerous cases were stayed pending hearings later this month on the issue. But U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler yesterday lifted a stay in the case of Ali Ahmed v. Bush .

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...0301269_pf.html