American Civil Liberties Union

Earlier this week, British journalist Andy Worthington reposted an article written by former Guantánamo detainee and ACLU rendition client Binyam Mohamed about Omar Khadr, one of the child soldiers detained at Gitmo since he was 15. Mohamed and Khadr were held in neighboring cages at Gitmo. Mohamed writes:

ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero spoke with Glenn Greenwald for Salon Radio about the release of our report evaluating President Obama's first year in office. Speaking specifically about the president's failure to meet his own deadline to close Guantánamo, Anthony says:

Guantánamo is not just a physical location or a symbolic gesture. It's also about a set of rules and policies that have been attached at Guantánamo. The holding of individuals without charges or trial, the lack of access to counsel, the conditions of their confinement, the conditions of their transfer, have not been worked out in the Thompson proposal. And in the end, if we move individuals who are being held indefinitely without charges or trial from Guantánamo to Thompson, Illinois, and we still hold them indefinitely without charges or trial, we've not fixed the Guantánamo problem, we've just shifted it to Guantánamo North.

Listen to the entire interview here, or read the transcript here.

Today an important deadline was missed. One of the most shameful chapters of American history was to have been brought to a close with the shuttering of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. President Obama's executive order to close the prison within a year (PDF), made on his second full day in office, was a bold act that signaled a strong commitment to breaking away from the unlawful policies of the Bush administration.

Eight years ago today, a Department of Defense C-141 transport plane carrying 20 prisoners arrived in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. On that day, January 11, 2002, the naval base began operating as a detention center for men captured in President Bush's so-called "war on terror."