American Civil Liberties Union

(Originally posted on Huffington Post.)

On January 22, 2009, his second full day in office, President Obama issued an executive order mandating that the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay be closed within a year. Well, the clock’s ticking and it’s not looking good. As January 22, 2010 fast approaches, the administration is signaling that it's unlikely to meet its own deadline.

Most Americans have only seen Guantánamo detainees as one-dimensional caricatures. But a new ACLU video features original footage in which the men talk about their lives — before, after and during their detention by the U.S.

Today, a group of musicians, including REM, Pearl Jam and The Roots filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to find out whether their music was played at the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay.  The request for information stems from former Guantánamo detainees’ testimony and released government documents that document that music has been used as part of interrogations.

Nearly four years have passed since I first traveled to Guantánamo to observe proceedings in the military commission prosecution of Canadian Omar Khadr, who was 15 years old when seized in Afghanistan and has now spent fully a third of his life in captivity. In an ordinary justice system, Khadr's trial – and very likely any possible sentence – would have been completed long ago. Here at Guantánamo, we were back to square one with the dismissal of one of Khadr's lawyers and the introduction of two new defense lawyers – numbers 10 and 11 by my count – who are unfamiliar with the case and will need quite a bit of time to get up to speed. In other words, it's déjà vu all over again.