From the Center for Constitutional Rights:
Last week CCR yet again urged the court to release Tariq Ba Odah, filing a reply brief and supplemental expert declarations renewing our argument that Tariq – who has been hunger striking to protest his unjust detention since 2007 and is “on the precipice of death” according to three medical experts – must be released on humanitarian grounds. Tariq has been detained at Guantánamo for over 13 years, despite never having been charged with any crime and having been cleared for release more than five years ago. And despite being brutally force fed 2,600 calories a day, he weighs just 74 pounds now. In its opposition to our June motion for Tariq’s release, the Department of Justice, shockingly, trotted out Bush administration arguments about how he was not covered under the Geneva Convention and does not have prisoner-of-war status. Tariq’s case has come to epitomize the incoherence and dysfunction of the Obama administration’s Guantánamo policy and has garnered major media attention as a result.
Meanwhile, for CCR client Zaher Hamdoun, who like Tariq has been detained at Guantánamo for over 13 years, it is his soul rather than his body that has been crushed nearly to death by injustice. In a heart-rending letter to his attorney, CCR’s Pardiss Kebriaei, he writes:
I have become a body without a soul. I breathe, eat and drink, but I don’t belong to the world of living creatures. I rather belong to another world, a world that is buried in a grave called Guantánamo.
