The detention center at Guantánamo Bay has now been in operation for 5 years. To date, nearly half of its prisoners—the supposed “worst of the worst”—have been released or, in a few cases, ended their own lives. Despite evidence that strongly suggests that a good many of the 393 remaining detainees ought be released, their freedom remains as elusive as their justice.

From the Washington Post:

Some at Guantanamo Mark 5 Years in Limbo

Shackled at the wrists and blinded by special goggles, the first captives from the U.S. war in Afghanistan were ushered to makeshift prison cells thousands of miles from the battle, at the U.S. naval station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, five years ago last week.

Gholam Ruhani was among them, the prison’s third official inmate, flown in by cargo plane with the first group of 20 men. The 23-year-old Afghan shopkeeper, who spoke a little English, was seized near his hometown of Ghazni when he agreed to translate for a Taliban government official seeking a meeting with a U.S. soldier.

Ruhani is still at Guantanamo, marking the fifth anniversary of the prison and his own captivity. He remains as stunned about his fate, according to transcripts of his conversations with military officers, as he was when U.S. military police led him inside the razor wire on Jan. 11, 2002, and accused him of being America’s enemy.

“I never had a war against the United States, and I am surprised I’m here,” Ruhani told his captors during his first chance to hear the military’s reasons for holding him, three years after he arrived at Guantanamo. “I tried to cooperate with Americans. I am no enemy of yours.”

Now prison and prisoner are forever linked, joined by hasty decisions made in war and trapped by that fateful beginning.

Guantanamo, which is struggling to rid itself of roughly 200 of its 393 remaining detainees, served its original purpose of taking dozens of terrorism suspects and enemy fighters from the chaotic Afghan battlefield and elsewhere, administration officials and the prison’s supporters say.

But after five years and more than $600 million, it has failed to quickly and fairly handle the cases of hundreds of people such as Ruhani, against whom the government has no clear evidence of a role in attacks against the United States, according to current and former government officials and attorneys for detainees.

In the administration’s effort to obtain raw intelligence, officials said, it was easier to ship hundreds of men with unclear allegiances to a naval base in Cuba in early 2002 and ask the hard questions later. But with a government focused on interrogations, a bureaucracy lacking tolerance for risk and a detention policy under legal attack, the United States has found it difficult to free many of the detainees, regardless of the information it has on the threat they pose. [full text]

For a more satirical take on the this unhappy anniversary, here is a recent clip from The Colbert Show:

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