Counter-terrorism analysts prepared a Summary of Evidence memo for the Combatant Status Review Tribunals of the 558 captives who remained in the Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba in the fall of 2004.
Contents
The memos release
The memos were released twice.
The 2005 release
507 of the 558 memos from the CSR Tribunals were released in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from the Associated Press. The DoD released five files. Four of those files have names suggesting they were released in January, February, March and April 2005. The fifth file's name says it is the final file. The DoD never explained why 51 of the memos were missing.
In this first release the captive's names were redacted from all but one of the memos. Their Internment Serial Numbers were redacted as well. And they contained hundreds of other small redactions. However, all of these memos contained handwritten notes, and 169 of the memos released in March had the captive's ISN handwritten back on the memos.
The memos were not in alphabetic order, they were not ordered on the ISN, or on the date when they were drafted.
The last 169 memos in the file released in March bore the captive's ISN in a hand-written notation.
The 2007 release
572 memos were released in nine pdf files on September 4, 2007. All 558 memos prepared for the CSR Tribunals held in late 2004 and January 2005, and an additional 14 memos from CSR Tribunals held in February, March and April 2007 were included. None of the names of ISNs were redacted. The memos were in order by ISN. The memos have no hand-written marginal notations.
The memos format
The memos were all from the Recorder assigned to the captive's Tribunal to the Personal Representative assigned to the captive. Under the rules under which the tribunals were conducted the Recorder was responsible for collating and compiling the allegations against the captive. Under the rules under which the Tribunals were conducted the Personal Representative was supposed to learn the captive's account of himself, and present that story to the Tribunal, if the captive was unwilling or unable to attend.
The memos all contained the same four numbered paragraphs:
A list of the allegations against the captive always followed the third paragraph
The format of the allegations
The allegations were always in the form of one, or two numbered lists.
The allegations in the second list, if present, were supposed to only contain allegations of hostile activity.
The allegations in first list were supposed to established to establish an association with al Qaida, the Taliban, or other organizations with an association with terrorism.