Mohammed Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani

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. 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. 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.

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. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on CIA torture Rabbani was tortured for two years by the CIA. According to the report he was a victim of mistaken identity.

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:

Habeas petition

A habeas petition was submitted on Rabbani's behalf to US District Court Judge Ricardo M. Urbina. 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.

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. 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. 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.

Formerly secret Joint Task Force Guantanamo assessment

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

Joint Review Task Force

When he assumed office in January 2009 President Barack Obama made a number of promises about the future of Guantanamo. He promised the use of torture would cease at the camp. He promised to institute a new review system. That new review system was composed of officials from six departments, where the OARDEC reviews were conducted entirely by the Department of Defense. When it reported back, a year later, the Joint Review Task Force classified some individuals as too dangerous to be transferred from Guantanamo, even though there was no evidence to justify laying charges against them. On April 9, 2013, that document was made public after a Freedom of Information Act request. Mohammed Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani was one of the 71 individuals deemed too innocent to charge, but too dangerous to release. Although Obama promised that those deemed too innocent to charge, but too dangerous to release would start to receive reviews from a Periodic Review Board less than a quarter of men have received a review.

Hunger strike

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

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. 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."