Zaher Hamdoun is a 36-year-old Yemeni man who has been detained in Guantnamo without charge since he was 22, one of 116 prisoners still detained there six years after Obama promised to close the facility. Hamdoun is not among the 52 men approved for transfer from Guantnamo, nor is he in a dwindling group of detainees the government plans to charge. He is in a nebulous middle category of people the Obama administration has determined it is not going to charge but doesn't know if it is ever going to release. Though the president in 2011 ordered periodic administrative reviews of men in this group ... the reviews didn't start until a mass hunger strike broke out in 2013. Still today, the majority of men haven't been reviewed, including Hamdoun. Though he has been a Guantnamo prisoner for almost 14 years without charge, and doesn't know if he will ever be released, the administration says this is not indefinite detention. [Hamoud writes of his current state]: "I have become a body without a soul. I breathe, eat and drink, but I don't belong to the world of living creatures. I rather belong to another world, a world that is buried in a grave called Guantnamo. I fall asleep and then wake up to realize that my soul and my thoughts belong to that world I watch on television, or read about in books. That is all I can say about the ordeal."
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