Security Detainees/Enemy Combatants

Foreign Nationals at Guantanamo Bay

Since 2002, the United States has held on the order of 600 nationals from more than 40 countries in military custody at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Many of those detained at Guantanamo were taken into custody during the war in Afghanistan following the attacks of September 11, 2001. Others were captured in places far from the Afghan battlefield, including Bosnia and Gambia. Most of the Guantanamo detainees have been held since 2002, and have not met with a lawyer, family or visitors. The administration has periodically transferred detainees, returning them to their home countries for release or continued detention. But the Pentagon has not indicated by what standards or rules detainees may be eligible for transfer. Families of a number of the detainees have challenged the legality of the Guantanamo detentions in U.S. courts. A decision as to whether U.S. courts have jurisdiction to consider the claims of the Guantanamo detainees is expected from the Supreme Court this summer.

The administration announced in November 2001 that some of the Guantanamo detainees would be tried before a military commission. For information related to military commission proceedings, please visit our Military Tribunals Resource Room.

Shafiq Rasul and Fawzi Khalid Abdullah Fahad Al Odah

In 2002, the family of Shafiq Rasul (a 26-year old British citizen), along with families of other Australian, British, and Kuwaiti detainees held at Guantanamo Naval Base, filed suit in U.S. court challenging the legality of their relatives' prolonged detention at Guantanamo Bay following their capture in the course of hostilities in Afghanistan in late 2001. While Mr. Rasul and a handful of other detainees have recently been released after more than two years in custody, many of those involved in the original suits remain in indefinite detention at Guantanamo.

The U.S. government maintains that those held at Guantanamo Bay may remain in custody - at the government's discretion - for the duration of the "global war on terror." Further, the Pentagon contends, U.S. courts may not review the detainees' cases because they are currently held outside U.S. borders. The detainees' families argue that the detainees were either innocent victims of bounty hunters or unfortunates mistakenly identified to U.S. forces as combatants. They argue that indefinite detention without review by an independent tribunal violates the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution and international treaties the United States has ratified.

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Feroz Abassi

Feroz Abassi, 23 years old, was born in Uganda and moved to London with his family at the age of eight. Mr. Abassi traveled to Afghanistan in December 2000. He was reportedly apprehended near Kunduz, Afghanistan, in December 2001, and has been in Guantanamo since January 2002. He is one of six individuals whom President Bush declared in July 2003 to be eligible for trial by military commission under the President's Novembeer 13, 2001 Military Order. While five other Britons were released in March of 2004, Abassi remains in Guantanamo.

On November 6, 2002, the British Court of Appeal issued a widely noted opinion in a case brought by Abassi's mother, in which she had sought a court order to the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office to intercede with the United States on her son's behalf. Though denying the requested remedy, the court took the opportunity to express extreme unease about the regime of "indefinite detention" in what it called the "legal black hole" of Guantanamo Bay.

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Stories from the Released

The U.S. Department of Defense reports that as of April 2, 2004, 146 persons have been transferred from Guantanamo Bay to their native countries. More than 80 percent of those transferred have been released, while the rest were transferred for continued detention in their respective countries. Most of the former detainees have been returned to Afghanistan and Pakistan, but detainees have also been returned to Great Britain, Spain, Russia, Denmark, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

A troubling picture of conditions at Guantanamo Bay emerged with the release of five Britons on March 9, 2004. According to the former detainees, three of them were arrested after they went to Pakistan to arrange a marriage for one of the men. Shafiq Rasul, Ruhal Ahmed, and Asif Iqbal say American soldiers beat them, stood on their legs, and questioned them at gunpoint. The men claim they initially narrowly survived a massacre by Northern Alliance troops, weathered constant interrogations at detention camps in Afghanistan, and withstood three months of solitary confinement. The men say these interrogation techniques prompted them to make false confessions (which have been proven untrue by British intelligence). Great Britain's Home Secretary David Blunkett has said that the men "do not constitute a threat to public safety." The U.S. Government has denied these accusations.

It is not entirely clear what criteria the U.S. government uses in determining who may be transferred and who remains detained. International law experts have suggested that detainees from nations that are allies of the United States have received preferential treatment in having their transfers approved.