It figures that her choice of a family pet would be a scrapper named Bella, a mutt found on the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Candace Gorman, a Chicago lawyer, has a pronounced soft spot for underdogs and seemingly hopeless causes.
Gorman, who practices alone, specializes in civil rights cases. She has been doing this for 25 years, simultaneously raising three kids, the youngest of whom is now in 11th grade. Her office, a nondescript walk-up on South Halsted in Greektown, is sandwiched between two Greek restaurants. She shares the space with law school classmate John Quall and her older brother Greg Gorman, also a lawyer.
But two years ago Gorman felt compelled to shut down her regular practice and focus all her attention on two clients — a Libyan shopkeeper named Abdul Hamid Al-Ghizzawi and an Algerian auto mechanic named Abdelrazak Ali Abdelrahman. In addition to the income lost from her regular practice, these cases are costing her a bundle in out-of-pocket expenses — and she knows there is no pot-of-gold settlement waiting at the end.
In March, I caught up with Gorman in The Hague, the tulip-dappled seat of the Dutch government and home of the new International Criminal Court. To make up for some of her lost income, Gorman accepted a temporary appointment as a visiting professional at the ICC. She and her husband, Chris Ross, accompanied by their 17-year-old daughter and Bella the dog, moved to the Netherlands in January 2008.
Gorman, 55, has a soft, round Irish face and slightly stout frame. Peering over reading glasses, she takes your measure with a steady gaze. Never one for power suits, Gorman embraces a sartorial style that is both casual and vaguely bohemian. Her relaxed look might cause her courtroom adversaries to breathe a sigh of relief or let down their guard. That would be a serious mistake. “She’s smart; she’s tenacious; she’s strong-willed. She’s a lawyer you want on your side,” says officemate Quall.
In a quiet cafe across from the Dutch parliament, I ask Gorman how she got involved with the two North Africans and the cause that swallowed her practice.
“It started,” she says, “with a luncheon I didn’t go to.”
That luncheon, in October 2005, was sponsored by the Chicago Council of Lawyers and featured a panel discussion on the legal issues surrounding the detention of “enemy combatants” at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The guest speaker was Gary Isaac, an attorney with Mayer Brown, an old Chicago firm that has grown into a multinational giant. Isaac had been involved with the Guantanamo litigation — including the Supreme Court’s landmark Rasul vs. Bush decision — from the beginning.
Gorman was intrigued by the topic. She had doubts about the Bush administration’s approach to the “War on Terror” and wanted to hear what Isaac had to say. But when the day of the luncheon arrived, she wasn’t feeling well and decided to skip it. A few days later, an e-mail arrived thanking her for her attendance and reminding her that Guantanamo still housed more than 200 men without legal representation.
“How could that be?” she wondered. With some 1.1 million lawyers in the U.S. (more than 60,000 of them in Illinois alone), how could it be that four years into their incarceration some of the Guantanamo detainees had not so much as spoken to a lawyer?
She called Isaac.
By the end of their 30-minute conversation, Gorman had volunteered to take on the case of one detainee. A few months later, she accepted a second case. The task ahead of her seemed pretty cut and dried; after all, the Supreme Court, in the 2004 Rasul decision, had firmly rejected the Bush administration’s claim that U.S. courts did not have jurisdiction to hear cases against the Guantanamo detainees. To Gorman, the case seemed a simple matter of getting her clients their day in court.
Five years after Rasul, that day still has not come.
In the months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the highest-ranking officials in the Bush administration — Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, CIA Director George Tenet and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice — met in the White House and quietly agreed to override some of the basic provisions of the U.S. Constitution that protect individual rights. They also decided to disregard the Geneva Conventions and to sanction the use of torture, which they renamed “enhanced interrogation techniques.” All of this they did in the name of national security. To provide legal cover for these activities (and to immunize themselves against future prosecution), they enlisted a cadre of government lawyers to draft opinions that cloaked what many believe to be war crimes in an aura of respectability. Ashcroft, a man of ponderous public piety, reportedly warned the group that “history will not judge us kindly.”
Restoring the rule of law has been a long, tough slog for a disparate and dedicated group of lawyers, including a large contingent from Chicago.
They took on the Bush administration at a time when it was not popular to do so. Their “patriotism” was called into question by the armchair patriots of talk radio. They endured threats to their livelihoods and reputations. In one notable tirade, Cully Stimson, a former assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, tossed out the names of several prominent firms (including two from Chicago, Jenner & Block and Mayer Brown) and said, “I think, quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms.”
All the Guantanamo lawyers are working pro bono, which means they are not charging for their services. But most work for big firms that can easily absorb the cost, or for universities, which continue to pay their salaries while giving them time to work on the Guantanamo cases. Gorman is one of the few who agreed to get involved with no such safety net.
“I didn’t think about the expense at the time. It was 2005. I had just settled the biggest case of my career, and I had finally been paid for 12 years of work. I was flush after a few precarious years,” she says.
That case was a $15 million settlement of a racial discrimination suit against R.R. Donnelley Co., the Chicago-based commercial printing company, on behalf of some 600 African-American employees. (R.R. Donnelley Co. prints the Magazine.) Donnelley settled after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with Gorman that the statute of limitations in civil rights cases should be extended from two years to four.
As soon as she’d received the names of her Guantanamo clients from the Center for Constitutional Rights, a non-profit group that is coordinating the legal efforts on behalf of the detainees, Gorman was ready to go to Cuba. She wanted to meet her clients face-to-face, hear their stories and get the facts of the government’s case against them. She was not expecting the obstacles the U.S. Department of Justice had prepared to block her path.
First, there was the security clearance, which can take months to obtain. (A number of lawyers, including Gorman’s brother, applied for security clearances and never received a reply.) Then, under the guise of national security, the Bush administration unilaterally revoked all semblance of attorney-client privilege and imposed a byzantine thicket of rules and procedural dead ends that would have impressed Franz Kafka.
The typical drill goes like this: After meeting with clients in Guantanamo, lawyers are obliged to immediately turn over all of their notes to the government for inspection. The inspection can take weeks, and when copies of the notes are finally returned to the lawyer, large sections often are blacked out. The unredacted originals are kept at a secret “secure facility” outside Washington where they can be viewed by defense counsel but not removed. Government lawyers’ briefs are deposited at the secure facility, and defense attorneys have to travel to Washington to see them (lawyers are not allowed to reveal the precise location of the facility). For a storefront attorney such as Gorman, travel costs can add up fast.
Let’s say Gorman wants to review the written record of accusations against her clients. She must again travel to the secure facility. If she wants to use this material in preparing a defense for her clients, she must do all her work on secure government computers at the facility and use the facility’s secure printer. If she uses her own computer at the facility, that computer becomes “tainted” and is subject to confiscation. Defense lawyers are not permitted to file any document with the court without first submitting it to the Court Security Office, which then shares the document with the government’s lawyers.
When defense lawyers work on detainee cases in their own offices, they are supposed to draw the shades.
“Yes, I re-read Kafka during all of this,” says Gorman. “Guantanamo is more Kafka than Kafka.”
It took Gorman 10 months to clear the bureaucratic hurdles and arrange her first trip to Guantanamo. The flight from Ft. Lauderdale to the U.S. base on the eastern tip of Cuba takes about 31/2 hours. The lawyers stay at the CBQ — the Combined Bachelors’ Quarters — on the leeward side of the base, across the bay from the prison complex. The accommodations are basic, but the price is right: $20 a night. The food, however, is uniformly terrible. “They deep-fry everything except the beer,” says Gorman.
A ferry takes the lawyers to the base’s windward side, where they pass through security. No cell phones or electronic devices allowed; ditto magazine articles or news stories that hint at the world beyond Guantanamo’s razor wire; no paper clips or staples — potential weapons in the hands of terrorists. Inside the wire, the name tags of U.S. military personnel are covered with tape.
Former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld once characterized the Guantanamo detainees as the “worst of the worst.” He declared that they were “among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.”
Each of the Guantanamo lawyers I spoke with said they started with the assumption that their clients were not model citizens.
“I thought that probably these guys were up to no good, but I didn’t think we should be holding anybody without charges,” is how Gorman puts it.
She met Al-Ghizzawi, her Libyan client, in a cramped, airless room — actually a converted storage container — at Camp Echo, Guantanamo’s isolation facility, where even the lawyers are not allowed to visit the toilet without an escort. Al-Ghizzawi turned out to be a frail, jaundiced man in his mid-40s, dressed in a khaki jumpsuit and flip-flops. He was in leg irons, which were chained to an eye boltin the floor.
“How do I know you are a lawyer?” he asked. Gorman, who had been briefed beforehand to wear a scarf over her hair and to avoid eye contact with Muslim males, nervously showed him several of the pocket-size legal licenses issued to all Illinois attorneys.
Eye contact didn’t seem to bother Al-Ghizzawi. He had bigger problems on his mind. Over the next three days, he poured out his story to his new lawyer. After serving in the Libyan army, he’d fled the country to avoid an involuntary extension of his conscription. He ended up in Afghanistan, married a local woman and opened a shop in Jalalabad that sold bread and honey. When American bombs started falling, he moved his family, which now included an infant daughter, to his wife’s village in the countryside. But opportunistic locals, enticed by the $5,000 bounty that the U.S. had put on the heads of “Arab fighters,” kidnapped him and sold him to the Northern Alliance, an Afghan militia supported by the U.S., which, in turn, collected the lucrative reward from the Americans. Al-Ghizzawi, who speaks English, actually thought he would be safe with the Americans. Instead, he was taken to Bagram Air Base near Kabul and then to Kandahar, where he says he was beaten with chains, forced to pose naked in front of female soldiers, threatened with rape, terrorized by dogs, made to kneel, crouch or stand for extended periods and deprived of sleep for days on end. He was among the first wave of prisoners shipped to Guantanamo.
Gorman was denied a meeting with her second client, Abdelrazak Ali Abdelrahman, known as Razak Ali, because of a dispute with the U.S. military over the exact spelling of his name. When Gorman made an offhand comment about her interest in bird-watching, the base commander tried to have her barred from Guantanamo, arguing that she was more interested in birds than her clients. A judge overruled the military, but it marked the beginning of what would be a long, difficult relationship between the military and the feisty Chicago lawyer.
When Gorman was finally permitted to meet Razak Ali — four months later — she learned that he was an auto mechanic and handyman who had traveled to Pakistan to look for a bride. He had the bad luck of staying at a guesthouse in Faisalabad that Abu Zubaydah, a man the Bush administration believed to be a senior Al Qaeda operative, may have visited. When the FBI and Pakistani security forces captured Abu Zubaydah in a shootout at another location a few days later, they also arrested Razak Ali and 15 other Arab men who were staying at the guesthouse.
The U.S. accuses Razak Ali of being an Al Qaeda member, based on the hearsay of unnamed witnesses. Al-Ghizzawi is accused of serving as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, but the head of the military tribunal that reviewed Al-Ghizzawi’s file said the evidence “lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence.”
Despite repeated claims by the Bush administration and its supporters in Congress that the vast majority of the detainees were “vicious killers” who had been “captured on the battlefield,” it turns out that only about 5 percent of the detainees were captured by U.S. forces. Most of the rest — 86 percent, according to a detailed study by Seton Hall University School of Law — were rounded up by the Northern Alliance or Pakistani security forces in exchange for the reward money, or because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But what is most disturbing to Gorman and the other Guantanamo lawyers is that the CIA knew this almost from the beginning. A classified — but widely leaked — agency report from August 2002 concluded that the majority of the detainees had “no meaningful connection to Al Qaeda or the Taliban.” Or, as Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, commander of Guantanamo’s Delta Camp, told The Wall Street Journal, “Sometimes, we just didn’t get the right folks.”
Aside from the 14 “high value” detainees who were brought to Guantanamo in September 2006, virtually all of the remaining 241 prisoners are being held because, as Hood put it, “nobody wants to be the one to sign the release papers.”
The core issue in the Guantanamo legal battle is habeas corpus — Latin for “you have the body.” This is the bedrock principle of Anglo-American jurisprudence that allows those locked up by the government to challenge their imprisonment before a judge. It is a concept that dates to the Middle Ages. “If the king — or in this case, the president — can throw you in jail without a hearing, then all of our other rights are meaningless,” says Isaac, the lawyer who first got Gorman involved in the case.
After the Supreme Court’s Rasul ruling rejected the Bush administration’s first attempt to circumvent habeas corpus, the Republican majority in Congress tried again, passing the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. But this, too, was tossed out by the high court, in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld.
Undeterred, the Republican Congress mounted a third assault on habeas corpus.
Despite the importance of the issue, few Americans were paying attention in September 2006 when Tom Sullivan, a partner at Jenner & Block and a former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, journeyed to Washington to testify against the proposed legislation before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Sullivan, whose firm was representing 13 detainees, described the Guantanamo prison as “a concentration camp,” mocked the evidence against his clients as “a joke” and ridiculed the military hearings at which the evidence was reviewed as “a sham.” In a moment as dramatic as any since attorney Joseph Welch took on Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1954, Sullivan focused his scorn on Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the silver-haired former Texas Supreme Court justice and faithful advocate for the Bush administration’s anti-terror policies.
“You were a Supreme Court judge; you know what [judicial] review is,” Sullivan said with quiet fury. “You call this due process, Your Honor? Do you?”
Cornyn was speechless, and refused to shake Sullivan’s hand afterward. Three days later, the Senate, by a vote of 65-34, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which again denied habeas corpus to “enemy combatants.”
And for the third time, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Boumediene vs. Bush, threw it out.
For some of the Guantanamo lawyers, the case has been primarily about abstract and fairly academic legal questions — the rule of law, due process and the separation of powers. Isaac, for example, has never been to Guantanamo and doesn’t represent any of the detainees. But he is highly regarded among the Guantanamo lawyers for the powerfully argued briefs he has filed in each of the Supreme Court cases.
For most of the lawyers, however, Guantanamo has become a deeply personal and sometimes wrenching experience. Jeff Colman, a partner at Jenner & Block, represented four detainees, three of whom have been released.
“I’m not exactly a happy-go-lucky guy, but I’m not morose either. But after the first three or four trips to Guantanamo — my wife would tell you this — it would be a few days before I could talk about it,” he tells me in his airy corner office on the 43rd floor of the firm’s downtown headquarters.
Colman, who is Jewish, makes a point of calling Guantanamo a concentration camp. He notes that it is a guarded compound for the imprisonment of America’s political foes, all of whom have one thing in common — their Muslim faith. “That’s the classic definition of what a concentration camp is,” he says. One of Colman’s clients reminded him of his own teenage son. “They were about the same age. They looked a lot alike,” he says.
Colman began his efforts to extricate the 19-year-old, a Saudi national, from Guantanamo at about the same time his son went off to college. Four years later, on the day that Colman was preparing to travel to New York for his son’s graduation, he got an e-mail from one of his client’s relatives saying that the client was being released and sent back to Saudi Arabia.
“Four years and five months in Guantanamo. No charges, no explanation, no apology,” says Colman. “He should not have spent one day in there.”
Pat Bronte, another Jenner & Block partner and a specialist in insurance law, also represents a detainee who, she says, reminds her of her own son.
“It’s impossible to meet this kid and conclude he’s some kind of major terrorist,” she says. Still, the young man, a Yemeni, was tortured at the so-called Prison of Darkness outside Kabul before being shipped to Guantanamo.
He is still being held. “The amazing thing,” says Bronte, “is that he seems to have no bitterness toward the United States.”
Marc Falkoff’s anger becomes palpable when he recalls his most recent meeting with his client, Adnan Latif, a slight, 30-year-old Yemeni and apparent victim of Afghan bounty hunters.
“He was lying on the floor [in the interview room]. He was so emaciated he looked like a Holocaust survivor. There was blood in his vomit and his stools. I really thought he was going to die,” says Falkoff, a law professor at Northern Illinois University.
Two months earlier, Latif had tried to hang himself.
Shaken by his client’s appearance, Falkoff asked the military for Latif’s medical records. The military refused. To this day, he has not seen the medical records.
But shortly after the visit, he did receive an urgent phone call from the Justice Department after Latif, who was being force-fed twice a day, bit off a 10-inch piece of his feeding tube. A government lawyer warned that if Latif did not unclench his jaws and release the tube, it would be removed surgically.
Falkoff, who last year battled military censors to publish a volume of poetry he collected from Latif and other Guantanamo inmates, recalls his client’s plea: “Don’t let them force-feed me. It’s torture.”
Joe Margulies, a gangly, bearded lawyer who is the assistant director of the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern School of Law, has been involved in the Guantanamo litigation from the very beginning. He was lead counsel in Rasul, and he has represented two detainees who were subjected to “extraordinary rendition” by CIA operatives, meaning that they were taken from their initial location to a second country where they were tortured by local security forces before being transferred to Guantanamo.
One, Binyam Mohamed, is a 30-year-old British citizen who was arrested in Pakistan and soon found himself in a Moroccan torture chamber where, in addition to the usual beatings, sleep deprivation and death threats, his tormentors repeatedly sliced his penis with a razor, according to human rights officials who have seen the evidence.
The other, Mamdouh Habib, a 53-year-old Australian national, also was arrested in Pakistan and flown to Egypt, where he spent five months being worked over by Egyptian security forces.
Both men have since been released. No charges were ever brought against either.
These days, Margulies is representing the infamous Abu Zubaydah. His arrest, in March 2002, was hailed as a major breakthrough by the Bush administration, which described the 31-year-old Saudi-born Palestinian as the No. 3 man in Al Qaeda.
“The other day we hauled in a guy named Abu Zubaydah,” President Bush boasted to a group of GOP donors in Connecticut a few weeks after the arrest. “He’s one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction in the United States. He’s not plotting and planning anymore. He’s where he belongs.”
At a secret “black site,” apparently in Thailand, Abu Zubaydah quickly became the CIA’s guinea pig for “enhanced interrogation techniques.” He was stripped naked and shackled to a chair, or sometimes a bed, for weeks at a time. The room temperature was kept very low, and Abu Zubaydah was repeatedly doused with cold water. Loud music blared constantly and the lights were never turned off. His only food was Ensure, a liquid nutrient supplement.
Sometimes he was placed in a coffinlike box for several hours.
During interrogations, a collar was placed around his neck, and his head was repeatedly slammed into a wall. Later, he would be water-boarded, a form of torture that simulates drowning and was specifically approved by the Bush administration.
Abu Zubaydah gave this account of his treatment to the Red Cross, and it tracks precisely with the Justice Department’s recently released 2002 torture memo that spells out the permissible “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Abu Zubaydah’s story was also corroborated by one of his CIA interrogators, John Kiriakou, in an interview with ABC News. Kiriakou said that every step in the process was cleared in advance with senior CIA officials. And we know now that CIA Director Tenet made sure Bush and his national security team were also in the loop.
Abu Zubaydah’s case, says Margulies, “appears to be the first time there was ever a meeting in the White House to discuss the interrogation of an individual prisoner.”
To the disappointment of the Bush administration, Abu Zubaydah, already brain-damaged as a result of a head injury sustained fighting in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, turned out to be less useful than they’d hoped.
“Their intelligence was wrong,” says Margulies. “He was not a member of Al Qaeda; he was not involved in 9/11; he did not know much about anything.”
Former Vice President Cheney still insists that that these interrogation techniques provided valuable intelligence and saved American lives. He has asked the CIA to declassify the reports that he says will prove this.
Meanwhile, Abu Zubaydah languishes in solitary confinement at Guantanamo. Charged with no crime, the videotapes of his torture sessions destroyed by the CIA, he has, in the words of his lawyer, been “air-brushed out of history.”
Al-Ghizzawi, Candace Gorman’s client, has been subjected to a different kind of torment. She bitterly describes it as “kinder, gentler torture.”
The beatings have ceased. Instead, Al-Ghizzawi is being allowed to slowly and painfully succumb to an untreated liver disease, according to a Red Cross doctor who has seen him.
Gorman lined up a Swiss clinic that was willing to treat Al-Ghizzawi, and successfully lobbied the Swiss government, which agreed to accept Al-Ghizzawi if the Bush administration made an official request. The White House insisted that the Swiss government had to make the offer first. The deal collapsed.
At one point, Al-Ghizzawi’s guards told him — falsely, it turns out — that he had AIDS.
Gorman has visited Guantanamo 17 times over the last three years. She will visit again later this month. Razak Ali, her Algerian client, seems to be holding up well, but she fears that Al-Ghizzawi won’t last much longer. Kept in solitary confinement, he spends his days washing and rewashing his clothes. He recently told Gorman that he has started talking to himself, that he is losing his grip on reality.
Gorman has urged him to fight for his sanity while she fights for his release. But she fears this is a race she cannot win. Al-Ghizzawi has given her his last will and testament.
“I see the effects of being locked up in a hell hole for seven years,” Gorman says quietly. “I know it’s supposed to be about the law and the Constitution, but for me it’s become something very personal.”
Gorman, who grew up on Chicago’s South Side, comes by her fighting instincts naturally. Her father, Robert Gorman, was a lawyer who achieved his moment in the national limelight in the 1950s when he won the release of a man who had spent 26 years in the Joliet Penitentiary for a robbery he did not commit. The story was featured in the Saturday Evening Post, and later dramatized for television by the Armstrong Circle Theatre.
In 1947, her father ran for judge on the Progressive Party ticket headed by Henry Wallace, and four years later for Congress as an anti-machine Democratic. He lost both times. Studs Terkel was an occasional visitor to the Gorman home, and her father’s leftist leanings attracted the interest of inquisitors from the House Un-American Activities Committee.
The talk around the family dinner table was usually about politics and social justice. “It was just part of the fabric of the household,” Greg Gorman says.
After majoring in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Candace Gorman followed in the footsteps of her brother and father by going to law school. Her first case involved a 17-year-old who, she says, “was in a car as a passenger when the driver picked up another kid who just happened to have stolen some woman’s purse.” Gorman got the charges dropped after the first hearing, but she never got paid.
“After that, I learned that you’re supposed to get the money upfront,” she says. It’s a lesson she tends to ignore with some regularity.
Two years into the Guantanamo litigation, Gorman stopped taking new cases and suspended her regular practice. “I had to make a decision,” she says. “I was spending all my time on the Guantanamo cases, and I wasn’t comfortable representing other clients.” One reason she wasn’t comfortable was she suspected the government was listening to her phone calls.
Two years ago, on the fifth anniversary of the Guantanamo detention facility, she caused a mild stir in the Chicago legal community when she wore a prisoner’s orange jumpsuit to work.
“Any excuse to talk about Guantanamo,” she says, smiling now as she recalls the reaction it drew. “Mostly people crossed the street to get out of my way. But the point was to tell people about what’s going on down there. I’ll talk to anybody and everybody about Guantanamo — high schools, community groups, peace groups, churches. The more people know, the more we become responsible as a country. Twenty years from now, I don’t want people to be able to say, ‘We didn’t know.'”
Gorman accepted the temporary position with the International Criminal Court in part to recoup some of her lost income but mainly “to fill the lulls” during the slow-moving Guantanamo litigation. With her background in class-action lawsuits, she is advising the ICC on how to deal with large groups of victims. Her husband, Chris Ross, a demographer, found an appointment with a Dutch research institute.
Quall, her friend from law school, says Gorman may have a soft spot for the underdog, but she has a cold, hard eye for what it takes to win. “She has an eye for good cases. She’s proven that in her practice and the success she has had in civil rights cases,” he says. “Her job, as she sees it, is to give voice to people who have no voice.”
Other Guantanamo lawyers who have worked with Gorman praise her toughness, her tenacity and her refusal to be cowed by the military or by the formidable power of the Justice Department. She regularly uses left-leaning blogs, such as the Huffington Post and Michael Moore’s Web site, to vent her displeasure with judicial rulings that go against her clients, but she isn’t shy about saying the same things directly to the offending judge. Or to a future U.S. president. In 2006, at Democratic Party fundraiser in Chicago, she delivered a stern lecture to the junior senator from Illinois who had made the mistake of voting in favor of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005.
Three years later, President Barack Obama, on his second full day in office, signed an executive order to close down the Guantanamo prison within one year. He also ended the so-called military commissions that were set up to try the detainees, ordering a Cabinet-level panel to come up with a process for either charging the detainees with crimes or releasing them. But Gorman and other Guantanamo lawyers say a year is too long to wait. They also complain that they have seen no change in the Justice Department’s hardball approach to the cases.
Then there is the touchy question of guilt and responsibility. In April, the Obama administration authorized the release of the long-classified memos that gave the green light for torture. But at the same time, Obama made clear that there would be no prosecutions of those in the military and the CIA who carried out the torture with the understanding that it was specifically authorized by the White House.
What Obama left conspicuously unsaid was what actions might be taken against the former Bush administration lawyers who wrote the memos. A report prepared earlier this year by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (which had not been released when the Magazine went to press) reportedly recommends that the lawyers be disbarred.
Most of the Guantanamo defense lawyers say they would be satisfied with a South African-style “truth and reconciliation” commission, which at least would get the facts out, even if it didn’t necessarily lead to prosecutions or disbarment.
Gorman, not surprisingly, disagrees. “Is it enough to find out the truth? Well, I think we already know the truth,” she says.
It’s March in The Hague. Daffodils are already up, the tulips are soon to follow, and criminal proceedings are under way against some of the world’s most notorious war criminals — Liberia’s Charles Taylor is on trial for crimes against humanity; the trial of Radovan Karadzic, Bosnia’s wartime leader, is expected to begin soon; and an arrest warrant has been issued for Sudanese President Omar Bashir, the man who presided over the Darfur genocide. Gorman believes that senior Bush administration officials belong here too.
“To me, there is no question they are war criminals. They enabled the process that took place,” she says.
She is particularly contemptuous of John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Justice Department lawyers most responsible for the torture memo. “It wouldn’t have happened without the lawyers,” she says.
“In the back of my mind, I’ve kept my own list of the worst of the worst,” Gorman says. “I don’t know what I can do at this point. Right now, I’m focused on my two clients and getting them out. When they’re out, we’ll see what’s next.”
