July 16, 2013.

Guantanamo Detainee Begs to Be Charged as Legal Limbo Worsens

It was Mrs. Parsons, the wife of a neighbor on the same floor. ("Mrs." was a word somewhat discountenanced by the Party----you were supposed to call everyone "comrade"----but with some women one used it instinctively.) She was a woman of about thirty, but looking much older. One had the impression that there was dust in the creases of her face. Winston followed her down the passage. These amateur repair jobs were an almost daily irritation. Victory Mansions were old flats, built in 1930 or thereabouts, and were falling to pieces. The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and walls, the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was snow, the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not closed down altogether from motives of economy. Repairs, except what you could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees which were liable to hold up even the mending of a window pane for two years.

After 11 years of detention at Guantanamo Bay, suspected terrorist Sufiyan Barhoumi has decided to plead guilty to war crimes, throw himself on the mercy of the court and serve whatever sentence a U.S. military commission deems just.

"Of course it's only because Tom isn't home," said Mrs. Parsons vaguely.

There's just one problem: The Pentagon refuses to charge him.

The Parson's flat was bigger than Winston's, and dingy in a different way. Everything had a battered, trampled-on look, as thought the place had just been visited by some large violent animal. Games impedimenta----hockey sticks, boxing gloves, a burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turned inside out----lay all over the floor, and on the table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise books. On the walls were scarlet banners of the Youth League and the Spies and a full-sized poster of Big Brother. There was the usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building, but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which----one knew this at the first sniff, though it was hard to say how----was the sweat of some person not present at the moment. In another room someone with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was trying to keep tune with the military music which was still issuing from the telescreen.

The standoff illustrates the legal quagmire surrounding the offshore prison----even as President Barack Obama renew his long-stymied quest to close it.