As we always do at the onset of our meeting with Ravil Mingazov, my interpreter and I spread a variety of food items on the table in front of us — crusty bread, cheese and an array of sweets. We’ve gone through this same ritual every three months for five years now. And while things change for us in the outside world — marriages occur, babies are born, holidays are celebrated — for Ravil, there is very little that has changed from our first meeting back in January 2006.
Ravil remains in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — eight years after the night he was arrested at a house for refugees in Faisalabad, Pakistan. He remains in Guantánamo more than three years after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its opinion in Boumediene v. Bush extending the writ of habeas corpus to Guantánamo detainees and giving the lower courts great discretion in how to handle these cases.
