by Mahvish Khan
“I’m up working on your case,” the lawyer said.
“No, you just started on my case. What have you been doing for the past fifteen years?”
There was no response.
“If I wasn’t in here, I’d have twelve kids by now!” Taj exclaimed.
I don’t think the two men really liked each other after that.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE LAWYERS
I met as many lawyers as detainees at Guantánamo in similar rainbow assortment. The detainees all wore white, or if they were “noncompliant,” tan or orange, but the attorneys sported even more colorful wardrobes, especially when the female lawyers donned headscarves.
Even in the 85-degree Caribbean sun, some of the male lawyers wore suits and ties to meet with their bearded Afghan or Arab clients. That’s what they wore for all their other clients, these attorneys said; they believed that the Guantánamo detainees should be offered the same respect. The detainees knew what suits and ties signified; even the farmers and shopkeepers knew that those formal outfits were the uniform of important men who work in offices.
But most of the lawyers weren’t so formal. Some wore T-shirts and zippered cargo pants. Most dressed business-casual in khakis and polo shirts. I developed my own uniform: a long skirt or pants with a white cotton wife-beater, all covered with a big shawl. The shawl was really just symbolic modesty because you could still see locks of hair that slipped out when I’d be balancing baklava, kabali pillau, and Pepsi in my arms.
There were more than five hundred habeas attorneys from assorted law practices representing Guantánamo Bay prisoners pro bono. They came from all over the United States and even a few from England. Almost 80 percent were with large firms such as Shearman and Sterling, Wilmer Hale, and Covington and Burling. When lawyers from these firms weren’t at Gitmo, they were busy representing people and companies like Giorgio Armani, Morgan Stanley, Harley Davidson, Halliburton, IBM, and Microsoft, as well as tobacco and pharmacy giants.
When Pentagon official Cully Stimson publicly suggested in January 2007 that corporate clients sever their business ties with these top firms because they were representing terrorists, the lawyers, American Bar Association leaders, and legal scholars all denounced his comments, and as far as we know, no major corporate clients defected from any of the firms.
In addition to corporate lawyers, there were about fifty to sixty U.S. federal public defenders working on behalf of Gitmo prisoners, as well as several law professors from Northwestern, Georgetown, Fordham, and other universities.
A small number of solo practitioners paid out of their own pockets to represent Gitmo detainees. Richard “Dicky” Grigg was a tall, sixty-year-old personal injury lawyer from Austin, Texas, and a great favorite among the lawyers and interpreters on the base.
“I was tired of bitchin’ and moanin’ about George W,” he told me in his Southern drawl, explaining his reasons for get- ting involved at Gitmo. “This was a chance to put my money where my mouth was.”
Dicky was never shy about telling you what he thought. When I told him once that I had brought roses for Afghan prisoner Chaman Gul, he did a double take and said, “What in the shit would a man want with roses?”
During some of the intense meetings with prisoners, Dicky would moderate, making sure to throw in a few laughs. All of the prisoners wanted to know what was going on in the world because it helped distract them for a little while and gave them something to talk about. Dicky’s client was pressing for news too. So, Dicky asked me with a straight face, “Now, do you think we ought to tell him about Paris Hilton? She’s been big in the news.” I started laughing, and the prisoner naturally wanted to know what was so funny. I explained, “There’s this American woman called Paris Hilton. She comes from a wealthy family and became famous by getting caught on tape having sex with her boyfriend. She is a high school dropout, and no one knows why she’s famous, but America is fascinated with her because she’s rich and hot. So, lately, she’s been in the news because she was drinking and driving and ended up in jail for a month.”
The detainee gave me a confused look, as if to say, “That’s big news in America?”
Many of the detainees would vent and unload onto their lawyers because they had no one else to talk to. Sometimes it would go on for several intense hours and often ended in a series of unanswerable questions: Why I am still here? It’s unfair. Why this injustice? Why?
Dicky had tried to placate his client many times during one meeting, then decided to tell him what he really believed.
“It’s because George Bush is an asshole.”
I turned to the young Afghan detainee, who didn’t look at me much, and said, “He says it’s because George Bush is a son of a bitch.”
The detainee tried to control his laughter.
Dicky turned to me. “How’d that one translate?” he asked. “George Bush is a son of bitch,” I said.
“Asshole. Son of a bitch. Close enough.” Dicky grinned.
Over the years, the lawyers formed various kinds of relationships with the prisoners. A few were fired early on because their clients didn’t trust them or didn’t have faith that they had any ability to influence a release. But others were greeted with bear hugs and ongoing gratitude. A few formed such a rapport with the prisoners that once the legal issues were dealt with, they spent the rest of the time talking about cricket or sharing photos of their wives and children. Some attorneys and clients told jokes, played cards, or took turns quizzing each other about their respective cultures.
Some of the American lawyers were fascinated by their Afghan clients’ multiple wives. One federal defender formed a particularly close friendship with his Afghan client, a tall, gray-eyed former mujahideen commander with two wives.
The lawyer barraged the Afghan with questions: Did the two women have their own rooms? How did he decide whom to go to on which night? Didn’t they get jealous? Did he like one more than the other? Was his first wife upset when he decided to marry a second time?
The commander smiled, cracked a few pistachio shells, leaned across the table, and began explaining. More conservative Afghans wouldn’t even tell you their wives’ names, much less allow you to see photographs of them. But in the vacuum of the prison meeting room, away from other prisoners’ prying eyes and judgments, he answered his lawyer’s personal queries.
When the lawyer asked whether the commander had ever had both wives in bed with him at the same time, I thought the questioning had gone a bit too far and suggested that we change the subject. I knew how quickly word traveled through the camp. The men at Gitmo had nothing to do all day but think about their imprisonment, reread a letter for the seven hundredth time, or gossip with other prisoners. Even in the solitary cells of Camp 6, it was common for a prisoner to lie down next to his cell door and shout through the crack at the bottom to other prisoners, then quickly put his ear to the narrow gap waiting for a response. Word also traveled from one camp to another as prisoners caught a glimpse of each other at the hospital or when they were moved for interrogations. They shouted whatever news they’d heard at the top of their lungs. I knew it wouldn’t be good if it ever got out that I had participated in a conversation about a ménage à trois. So, we steered the conversation to something not quite so risqué.
Just as the lawyers were curious about mysterious tribal mores, the Middle Eastern men were curious about similarly baffling American customs. Some of the detainees didn’t understand why Westerners exchange simple rings during their wedding ceremonies as opposed to the heavy gold jewelry and clothing given to an Afghan girl on her big day. Others were fascinated by certain societies’ tolerance of children born out of wedlock or with the American habit of getting drunk to the point of impaired judgment.
Some found it inexplicable that Americans sometimes meet their husbands or wives on the Internet or often wait until they are thirty-five or older to get married. They concluded that Americans would marry at sixteen, eighteen, or twenty i
f they too had to maintain their virginity until marriage. Some prisoners wanted to confirm the myth that American men could only marry one woman.
Aminullah, a farmer said, “I had heard this, but I didn’t believe it. Even the poorest man in Afghanistan has more than one wife. Having one wife is like wearing just one pair of clothes over and over.”
Aminullah was a kind and gracious old man who had been cleared by the Department of Defense to be transferred back to Afghanistan, but the way he compared a woman to a pair of clothes was striking. I know that men all over the world have extramarital affairs, but in the United States, men don’t marry a second wife. They sometimes divorce the first one and remarry, often a younger woman, but to hear a woman being compared to clothing that can be changed and discarded made me cringe. I silently thanked my lucky stars once again that I’d had the good fortune to grow up in a country where those kinds of views had been discredited and discarded long ago.
The attorneys all had different ways of explaining legal issues to the prisoners. Some talked a lot about case law and crammed a year of constitutional law into a thirty-minute lecture. Some dominated the meetings by discussing congressional legislation. A partner at a large New York corporate law firm attempted to explain the implications of the Detainee Treatment Act, a 2005 congressional statute, to an illiterate prisoner from rural Afghanistan. The lecture put the lawyer’s associate to sleep, and the prisoner started to doze off too.
Other times, prisoners like Taj Mohammad, Nabi Omari, or Haji Rohullah dominated the meetings. They would tell their attorneys what they thought of U.S. foreign policy and how the United States’ image as a symbol of justice had crumbled. Many of the prisoners were very sophisticated and quickly grasped cornerstone constitutional concepts such as the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the U.S. federal court system. Others passively told their attorneys that they didn’t understand anything and that the attorneys should simply act in their best interest. Some attorneys didn’t bother to explain what the Geneva Conventions were all about before going off on a convoluted tangent about Article 3’s provisions on the treatment of prisoners, which would frustrate some prisoners, while others would politely pretend to understand.
There were some talented poets among the habeas team— as there were among the prisoners. Portland federal defender Chris Schatz wrote this poem to his friend and client Chaman Gul, in which he imagines Chaman’s Gitmo experience:
I am a prisoner in a foreign land,
the circumference of my life reduced to a cage not fit for a
dog,
a prisoner of despair that is not of my own making—
for I was betrayed.
When the soldiers from the West first brought me to this
maze of tombs
my heart was still young,
now my beard is gray and the rose of my life is withering,
day after day my captors try me with their questions,
insisting that I be other than what I am,
when I answer, the voice I hear is no longer my own,
my soul has become a wisp of smoke, my heart—a stone.
In the lunar landscape of my solitary room
I walk in silence with fear following hard upon my every
step,
fear not only that I will be forgotten, but that in time I will
myself
forget the rhythm of life and death,
the touch of my aged mother’s hand,
the warmth of home and marriage bed,
until my memories are as if fallen into a dry well— buried in sand.
Only when the gentle face of my sister hovers in the air
before me,
comforting me with her tears, do I remember that I still love.
From my cell I cannot see the sea though she is near,
her dark eyes haunt my dreams
and when I pray I hear her song of freedom— wave upon wave.
Someday the sea will cast herself against these walls
and break them down,
and I will float away upon her breast
under the blue sky of day and the star-pocked void of
night
until I am at last returned to the mountains and valleys of my own land,
to Afghanistan, where my two dear wives
and my brave children will greet me with shy smiles and tender kisses,
and I will be a man again and free.
Many attorneys readily admitted that the court process wasn’t going to be the magic bullet that would send their clients home. At a barbecue one night, a few lawyers said that the media and the global pressure on the administration to restore America’s tarnished image would make the difference. While lawyers helped keep Gitmo in the world’s eye via lawsuits, many of the habeas brigade felt helpless as they waged a seemingly fruitless legal battle.
Sometimes, it even seemed as though to the clients, legal counsel was beside the point. One lawyer told me that he often felt like a glorified waiter and social worker. Some of the Arab clients gave their attorneys grocery lists. One of the Kuwaitis once asked his lawyers to bring him two large pizzas, three McDonald’s fish filet sandwiches, ice cream, ten Hershey’s chocolate bars, eight KitKat bars, a package of Oreo cookies, and a half-gallon of chocolate milk. The attorneys brought it all and stared at the young Arab man as he devoured the food later that afternoon. His interpreter told me only half a cup of chocolate milk and some cookies were left. The detainee ended up with a bad stomach ache.
Then, there were the odd and even comical situations that attorneys had to deal with. I think the prize in this category has to go to Clive Stafford Smith for his exchange with the military regarding contraband lingerie and bathing suits.
On August 12, 2007, Smith received this communication from the military regarding two of his firm’s clients, Shaker Aamer and Muhammed Hamid al-Qareni:
Dear Mr. Stafford Smith:
Your client, Shaker Aamer, detainee ISN 239, was recently discovered to be wearing Under Armor briefs and a Speedo bathing suit. Neither item was issued to the detainee by JTF-Guantánamo personnel, nor did they enter the camp through regular mail. Coincidentally, Muhammed al-Qareni, detainee ISN 269, who is represented by Mr. Katznelson of Reprieve, was also recently discovered to be wearing Under Armor briefs. . . .
We are investigating this matter to determine the origins of the above contraband and ensure that parties who may have been involved understand the seriousness of this transgression. As I am sure you understand, we cannot tolerate contraband being surreptitiously brought into the camp. Such activities threaten the safety of the JTF-Guantánamo staff, the detainees, and visiting counsel.
In furtherance of our investigation, we would like to know whether the contraband material, or any portion thereof, was provided by you, or anyone else on your legal team, or anyone associated with Reprieve. We are compelled to ask these questions in light of the coincidence that two detainees represented by counsel associated with Reprieve were found wearing the same contraband underwear.
Thank you as always for your cooperation and assistance,
Sincerely,
[Name redacted] Commander, JAGC,
US Navy Staff Judge Advocate
Clive responded at length on August 29:
Dear Cmdr. [redacted]:
Thank you very much for your letter dated August 12, 2007. . . . I will confess that I have never received such an extraordinary letter in my entire career. . . . I take accusations that I may have committed a criminal act very seriously. In this case, I hope you understand how patently absurd it is, and how easily it could be disproven by the records in your possession. I also hope you understand my frustration at yet another unfounded accusation against lawyers who are simply trying to do their job—a job that involves legal briefs, not the other sort.
Let me briefly respond: First, neither I, nor Mr. Katznelson, nor anyone else associated with us has had anything to do with smuggling �
��unmentionables” in to these men, nor would we ever do so. Second, the idea that we could smuggle in underwear is farfetched. As you know, anything we take in is searched and there is a camera in the room when we visit the client. Does someone seriously suggest that Mr. Katznelson or I have been stripping off to deliver underwear to our clients?
Third, your own records prove that nobody associated with my office has seen Mr. Aamer for a full year. Thus, it is physically impossible for us to have delivered anything to him that recently surfaced on his person. Surely you do not suggest that in your maximum security prison, where Mr. Aamer has been held in solitary confinement almost continuously since September 24, 2005, and where he has been more closely monitored than virtually any prisoner on the base, your staff have missed the fact that he has been wearing both Speedos and “Under Armor” for 12 months? Since your records independently establish that neither I nor Mr. Katznelson could have been the one who delivered such undergarments to Mr. Aamer, this eliminates any “coincidence” in the parallel underwear sported by Mr. el-Gharani. Your letter implies, however, that Mr. Katznelson might have something to do with Mr. el-Gharani’s underthings. Mr. Katznelson has not seen Mr. el-Gharani for four months. As you know, Mr. el-Gharani has been forced to strip naked in front of a number of military personnel on more than one occasion, and presumably someone would have noticed his apparel then. . . .
It seems obvious that the same people delivered these items to both men, and it does not take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that members of your staff (either the military or the interrogators) did it. Getting to the bottom of this would help ensure that in future there is no shadow of suspicion cast on the lawyers who are simply trying to do their job, so I have done a little research to help you in your investigations. I had never heard of “Under Armor briefs” until you mentioned them, and my Internet research has advanced my knowledge in two ways—first, Under Armour apparently sports a “U” in its name, which is significant only because it helps with the research.