Haji Ghalib

Haji Ghalib is a citizen of Afghanistan who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba.

His Guantanamo Internment Serial Number was 987.

Guantanamo counter-terrorism analysts estimate he was born in 1963, in Nangarhar, Afghanistan.

1 October 2004.

The memo listed the following allegations against him:

Ghalib chose to participate in his Combatant Status Review Tribunal.

The request to the US State Department went out on October 13, 2004, with a deadline of November 8, 2004.

By November 24, 2004, the date of the Tribunal, no reply had been received, so the Tribunal's president ruled

that those witnesses, and those documents, were "not reasonably available".

Ghalib denied being a member of the Taliban.

He asserted that he had been a member of the anti-Taliban resistance for eight years, fighting under Haji Abdul Cades and his brother Haji Abdul Haq.

He said he was present when Abdul Haq was killed, and was very close to Abdul Cades.

He asked for the testimony of Haji Bemohab Mohammed, the new Governor of Jalalabad and Haji Mohammed Sahara.

He said he named these two men because he knew they were well known to American officials.

He felt sure that their testimony would have established his innocence.

Ghalib told his Tribunal that he had captured many Arabs and Taliban, and turned them over to American custody.

He said he had even been part of the unit that went with the Americans to destroy Osama bin Laden's house.

He told his Tribunal he had much documentary and video evidence, back in Afghanistan, that would establish his innocence.

Ghalib told his Tribunal that he found the accusation that he had a letter from a Taliban leader shocking.

Ghalib told his Tribunal that, two months before his capture he had found out that a Mr. Hadrataly, a commander in Jalalabad, had written a letter falsely denouncing him to American authorities.

Ghalib attributed the false denunciation to Hadrataly being from a different party jockeying for power during Afghanistan's reconstruction.

Ghalib told his Tribunal that he responded to learning about the letter by traveling to Kabul and appealing to a senior official with ties to the Americans, to explain to them that he was innocent

The Department of Defense released a ten-page summarized transcript of the Tribunal on March 3, 2006.

Ghalib requested the testimony of three witnesses and some exculpatory evidence.

One of his witnesses was a fellow Guantanamo detainee, Kako Kandahari.

Kandahari was scheduled to testify in person.

His other two witnesses were in Afghanistan, as were the documents he requested.

The Tribunal's president told Ghalib the Department of Defense had requested the US State Department to request the Afghanistan Embassy in Washington to request the assistance of the Afghan Civil Service to locate the witnesses and the documents Ghalib needed.

Ghalib was repatriated on February 28, 2007.

Ghalib was sent to Guantanamo following anonymous denunciations.

He argued that he had been a loyal government official.

When he was finally repatriated the Afghan government reappointed him to senior security positions, where he became one of Afghanistan's most effective opponents to the central government's opponents.

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.

A Summary of Evidence memo was prepared for

Ghalib's Combatant Status Review Tribunal,

on