President Barack Obama seems to be making good on his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp within the next year, but that’s no reason to forget all the people who’ve spent years of their lives being illegally detained in the Cuban waterfront prison. As the jail that was not legal enough to be called one starts taking office inventories and packing up archives, Listicles looks back at a shameful chapter in American history that we’ll hopefully learn from with these 8 Guantanamo Bay Detainees’ Stories.

• Abdullah al-Ajmi: One of the first Gitmo detainees to be formally confirmed (though never tried), al-Ajmi was accused of participating in the Taliban ground war in Afghanistan. al-Ajmi was released to authorities in his native Kuwait in Fall of 2005, where he and five others were tried for helping to fund Al Wafa, a charity thought to be funding Al-Quaeda. He was aquitted of those charges and released on bail. Last spring al-Ajmi died carrying out a suicide attack in Mosul, Iraq, at the age of 29.

• Sami al-Hajj: An Al Jazeera cameraman arrested on his way to work in December 2001, al-Hajj spent nearly 7 years at Gitmo. He was accused, among other things, of selling arms to Chechen rebels, maintaining a pro-terrorism website and interviewing Osama Bin Laden. During his time at Gitmo al-Hajj claims to have been beaten on over 100 occasions and sexually abused. After a bout with throat cancer and prolonged hunger strike in 2007, al-Hajj was released to his hometown, the Sudanese capital Khartoum.

• Fouzi Khalid Abdullah Al Awda: Detained at Gitmo since 2002, Al Awda has still not been charged with anything and a case challenging his and other detainees’ imprisonment is being reviewed by the Supreme Court. Al Awda was captured by Pakistani bounty hunters after going to the Pakistan/Afghanistan border in 2001 to do humanitarian work. One of many Gitmo detainees to go on a food strike, Al Awda lost so much weight that he was strapped to a bed and put on a feeding tube to be kept from dying of starvation. His father wrote an Op-Ed for the Washington Post about his son’s detention, and Al Awda was finally repatriated to Kuwait in 2007.

• Abdullah Meshud: Handed over to American forces after surrendering himself to an Afghan warlord, Meshud was detained at Gitmo for just over two years. Meshud had been a Taliban fighter and, upon his release, returned to Afghanistan to fight coalition forces, at one point commanding as many as 5,000 soldiers and carrying out several attacks and kidnappings. At one point he was suspected of being a CIA double agent. He died in the summer of 2007 when, during a raid on a house where he and other Taliban fighters were staying, he killed himself by detonating a hand grenade.

• Muhammad Hamid Al Qarani: A national of Chad, Al Qarani was arrested for alleged involvement in the London terrorist cell Abu Qatada in 1999. At the time, Al Qarani was 12 years old and lived with his parents in Saudi Arabia. Held at Gitmo at least since 2004, Al Qarani has reported being deprived of sleep, having a cigarette extinguished on his skin and being threatened with genital mutilation. On January 14, 2009 Richard Leon, a U.S. District Court Judge ordered Al Qarani’s release due to lack of evidence and being only suspected because of accusations brought by two other detainees whose information has been deemed unreliable.

• Abdurahman Khadr: Khadr’s story is the stuff of spy movies (in fact, there’s a PBS documentary about his family). For years the Khadrs were close to the Bin Ladens, and after he was apprehended in Afghanistan in 2001 Khadr became an undercover informant for the CIA at Guantanamo. Stories diverge as to how long he spent in the miliatry prison (anywhere from six months to a year and a half), but afterward he continued to serve as a U.S. spy on at least one mission (to infiltrate a mosque in Sarajevo), before travelling to Canada hoping to be accepted as a refugee, though his legal status there is still undecided.

• Khirullah Said Wali Khairkhwa: After fighting against the Soviets with CIA-backed Afghan fighters, Khairkhwa was rewarded by the Taliban with various powerful job postings. He was the chief of police in Kabul, governor of the Herat province and an interior minister at various points throughout the 1990s. Apprehended in late 2001, Khairkhwa was detained in Kandahar, released for medical reasons and later taken to Guantanamo. Information on his current whereabouts, though ucnlear, suggests he’s likely still being held there.

• Abu Bakker Qassim: Aprehended in 2001 in Pakistan by bounty hunters, this Chinese national was detained in Afghanistan by American forces before being sent to Guantanamo. In late 2004 or early 2005 he was determined to never actually have been an enemy combatant (or, as the Pentagon likes to say, “No Longer Enemy Combatant”), though his detention continued. To avoid a difficult trial, U.S. forces transfered Qassim and several other Guantanamo detainees who weren’t being charged with anything to a base in Albania, where they’ve been for at least two years now, with little to no prospect of achieving legal refugee status anywhere. He wrote an op-ed about his experiences that was published by the New York Times shortly after arriving in Albania.