From In These Times
By Christopher Hayes

After the U.S. Senate voted last year to strip Guantánamo detainees of the right to habeas corpus, you’d think it would have dashed the hopes of the desperate prisoners that the world’s greatest deliberative body would prove their salvation. But Saifullah Paracha is apparently an eternal optimist. In March, after 18 months in Guantánamo, Paracha, 58, decided to write a letter to 98 U.S. senators describing his plight. The senators haven’t responded, though it’s hard to blame them. They don’t know the letters exist. The Department of Defense won’t release them for delivery.

He lived in the United States, says Paracha’s lawyer G. T. Hunt. He’s a pro-American person. He believes in American justice. He believes that if he can get a hearing he’ll get out.

In 1986, after studying and working in New York for 16 years, Paracha moved back to Pakistan, to Karachi where he and his wife raised four children and he managed several business ventures. In July 2003, Paracha traveled to Bangkok for what he thought was a meeting about a business opportunity. He never made it out of the airport. Masked men abducted him, taking him to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan where he was interrogated and, according to Hunt, imprisoned in a cell with no toilet. His family spent a month with no idea of his whereabouts, until the International Committee of the Red Cross notified them he was in U.S. custody. After a year in Bagram, he was sent to Guantánamo in September 2004.

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