"I wonder if the U.S. government wants to keep us here forever," wrote Suleiman al-Nahdi recently to his lawyers.
He's been cleared for release for five years now, but still sits in prison at Guantanamo because the federal government refuses to free him. His story of unlawful detention was told in a recent New York Times article.
Today marks 10 years that Gitmo has been illegally detaining prisoners without charge or trial.
The ACLU has been working to shut it down since this illegal prison opened.
Here's just one example of why: In 2001, Lakhdar Boumediene was falsely accused of being an al Qaeda operative while working for a humanitarian aid organization in Bosnia. Even though Bosnia's highest court found no evidence against him, the U.S. government imprisoned him at Guantánamo for 7 ½ years. He was never charged with a crime or given a trial. (You can hear about the horror of the experience from his own mouth in the latest episode of ACLU Studio.)
In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that the constitutional right of habeas corpus applied to the men imprisoned at Guantánamo, and ordered the government to give Mr. Boumediene and his fellow prisoners a meaningful opportunity in a civilian court to challenge their confinement.
When a United States District Court in Washington heard the supposed evidence against Mr. Boumediene, it ordered him set free. Today he lives in France with his wife and three children.
By the numbers alone, the story of Gitmo is sad, alarming and infuriating. The government itself says that 92 percent of the 779 men who have been imprisoned there since it opened were never al Qaeda fighters. The youngest person locked up there was 13, the oldest 98. This infographic explains more.
Ten years is 10 years too many. Join the movement to close Gitmo.
