Bostan Karim


Bostan Karim is a citizen of Afghanistan, who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba.
Karim's Guantanamo detainee ID number is 975.
Guantanamo counter-terrorism analysts estimate he was born in 1970, in Khowst, Afghanistan.
Karim was transferred to Oman on January 16, 2017.

Official status reviews

Originally the Bush Presidency asserted that captives apprehended in the "war on terror" were not covered by the Geneva Conventions, and could be held indefinitely, without charge, and without an open and transparent review of the justifications for their detention.
In 2004 the United States Supreme Court ruled, in Rasul v. Bush, that Guantanamo captives were entitled to being informed of the allegations justifying their detention, and were entitled to try to refute them.

Office for the Administrative Review of Detained Enemy Combatants

Following the Supreme Court's ruling the Department of Defense set up the Office for the Administrative Review of Detained Enemy Combatants.
Scholars at the Brookings Institution, lead by Benjamin Wittes, listed the captives still
held in Guantanamo in December 2008, according to whether their detention was justified by certain
common allegations:
To comply with a Freedom of Information Act request, during the winter and spring of 2005, the Department of Defense released 507 memoranda. Those 507 memoranda each contained the allegations against a single detainee, prepared for their Combatant Status Review Tribunals. The detainee's name and ID numbers were redacted from all but one of the memoranda. However 169 of the memoranda had the detainee's ID hand-written on the top right hand of the first page corner. When the Department of Defense complied with a court order, and released official lists of the detainee's names and ID numbers it was possible to identify who those 169 were written about. Bostan Karim was one of those 169 detainees.
The allegations against Karim presented to his Combatant Status Review Tribunal were:

Testimony

Karim chose to participate in his Combatant Status Review Tribunal.

Karim's witnesses

Karim began by asking why witnesses were disallowed. He was told that they were not “Not reasonably available”. Other Tribunals have specifically asked detainees to explain what they think unavailable witnesses would testify to. Karim wasn't asked to explain what he thought his witnesses would testify to.
During his testimony Karim repeatedly expressed his regret that his former partner Obaidullah, and Abdullah Wazir were not present to testify on his behalf. Usually
“Not reasonably available” meant that the witnesses were not in Guantanamo. But both Abaidullah and Abdullah Wazir were present in Guantanamo. Late, during the nine months it took to convene Tribunals for the 558 detainees who remained at Guantanamo there was a policy change about allowing detainees to call other detainees as witnesses. Following the policy change, the Personal Representative would meet with the witness, and take a statement, if they were classified at a different level of compliance than the detainee who requested them. The detainee was only allowed to question their witness, live and in person, if they were classified at the same level of compliance as their witness.

Karim's testimony

Karim chose to have the allegations against him read out, one at a time, so he could respond to each one in turn.
Karim denied being a member of the Taliban, or al-Qaeda. He denied knowing any Arabs, He denied having anything to do with land mines. He pointed out that he had to borrow money for the last buying excursion for his two stores.
Karim acknowledged that he was arrested at the border, when the minibus he was a passenger in was stopped. One of the other passengers was Abdullah Wazir, someone who had been a friend of his six years ago. When the van was stopped at the border the border control agents asked three of the passengers to step out, including Wazir. When Wazir stepped out he unexpectedly handed Karim a package. Karim didn't know what it was at first. He thought it might have been a camera. It was, in fact, Wazir's cell phone. Most of the money was Wazir's as well, except for 3,500 Rupees.
Karim said the burn scars on his hand and knee were from his childhood. His mother told him that when he was a toddler she had turned her back and he had tried to crawl on the cooking stove. He expressed skepticism that his pattern of burns, to two isolated parts of his body, could have been caused by an explosion.
Karim blamed the allegations against him on his former partner Abaidullah. He broke their partnership after a dispute over money. He felt Abaidullah owed him 80,000 Rupees. Abaidullah only acknowledged 60,000 Rupees. Karim suspected that Abaidullah may have drawn him into this trouble out of spite. Karim said that Abaidullah wouldn't have known what caused the scars to his hand because he had never told him.
Karim acknowledged serving as a missionary. However, his missionary work was for a branch of Islam that preached peace and tolerance. They were suppressed by the Taliban because of their exposition of tolerance and unwillingness to engage in jihad.

Administrative Review Board hearing

Detainees who were determined to have been properly classified as "enemy combatants" were scheduled to have their dossier reviewed at annual Administrative Review Board hearings. The Administrative Review Boards weren't authorized to review whether a detainee qualified for POW status, and they weren't authorized to review whether a detainee should have been classified as an "enemy combatant".
They were authorized to consider whether a detainee should continue to be detained by the United States, because they continued to pose a threat—or whether they could safely be repatriated to the custody of their home country, or whether they could be set free.
Karim chose to participate in his Administrative Review Board hearing.

Factors for and against Karim's continued detention

The factors for and against a detainee's continued detention are always broken down into related sections. Most detainee's transcripts retain the factor's classifications. But Karim's transcript did not.
Bostan Karim is one of the sixteen Guantanamo captives whose amalgamated habeas corpus submissions were heard by
US District Court Judge Reggie B. Walton on January 31, 2007.
Although a writ of habeas corpus had been submitted on his behalf, the DoD did not release the unclassified dossier from his Tribunal.
The DoD has not offered an explanation why his dossier was not included with the dossiers of the other captives released in September 2007.