Taking on Guantánamo

[Doondoo]

Assigned to defend a Guantánamo detainee, JAG lawyer Charles Swift joined up with legal scholar Neal Katyal and sued the president and secretary of defense over the new military-tribunal system. With their 2006 Supreme Court victory overridden by the Republican Congress, and Swift's navy career at an end, they are fighting on.

"The whole purpose of setting up Guantánamo Bay is for torture. Why do this? Because you want to escape the rule of law. There is only one thing that you want to escape the rule of law to do, and that is to question people coercively—what some people call torture. Guantánamo and the military commissions are implements for breaking the law. Why build a prison here when there are plenty of prisons in Nebraska? Why is it, when we see photos of Abu Ghraib, we think that it is "exporting Guantánamo"? That it is the "Guantánamo method"? —Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift to the author, January 2007.

He could not even get his client a pair of socks. That realization came to Charlie Swift, a lawyer in the navy's Judge Advocate General's Corps (JAG), as he landed in Guantánamo. It was December 22, 2006, a few weeks before the fifth anniversary of the arrival of the first enemy detainees at the American naval base in Cuba. Swift had been a JAG defense lawyer for 12 years and was making his 30th visit to Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a diminutive Yemeni who had been held for more than five years. The first time Swift met Hamdan, in January 2004, the prisoner was in shackles. "I am freezing," Hamdan told him. "Can't you get me a pair of socks?" After that, Swift brought Hamdan socks. Sometimes his client was given them, sometimes he was not. Now, nearly three years later, Hamdan was at the center of a landmark Supreme Court case, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, held up as a symbol of detainees' rights and the need for the Geneva Conventions, yet he was still mired in legal limbo.

The island, once again, seemed inexpressibly strange to Swift. He always drove past a sign that read HONOR BOUND TO DEFEND FREEDOM. "This is probably not the best sign for this place," Swift said to himself on one of his first trips. Seeing the rec hall and a McDonald's, he made notes for a future jury summation: "This is the island of misfit toys."


http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/guantanamo200703?printable=true¤tPage=all