“Since Obama took charge he has not shown us that anything will change.”
– Guantanamo captive Mohammad el Gharani
Excerpt:
Gharani, now 21, has been held at Guantanamo for seven years. He was ordered to be freed by a US district judge in Washington in January, a week before president Barack Obama took office and ordered the prison
operation to be shut down within a year.
The camp was opened by the Bush administration in 2002 to hold and interrogate suspected al Qaeda and Taliban members after the Sept. 11 attacks. Critics have condemned the facility as a symbol of abuses in
Washington’s war on terrorism.
Gharani lives in a group housing compound with other detainees who have been cleared for release, where they are subject to fewer restrictions than most of the 240 Guantanamo captives and allowed weekly phone calls. He told Al Jazeera he had been beaten with batons and teargassed by a group of six soldiers wearing protective gear and helmets after refusing to leave his cell.
“This treatment started about 20 days before Obama came into power, and since then I’ve been subjected to it almost every day,” he told Al Jazeera.
…
Gharani was captured in Pakistan in late 2001 and taken to Guantanamo Bay in early 2002. The U.S. government said the then-14-year-old had stayed at an al Qaeda-affiliated guest house in Afghanistan, fought in the battle of Tora Bora in 2001, served as a courier for senior al Qaeda operatives and was part of a London-based al Qaeda cell.