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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Will Gunn was on a training mission to Buenos Aires when he learned that he might be chosen as the lead defense counsel in the trials by military tribunal of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The military has placed approximately six hundred and fifty suspected war criminals, captured in connection with the war in Afghanistan, in custody at the American naval base in Cuba--the interrogation and detention center now officially known as Joint Task Force Guantanamo. Their ranks, and thus Gunn's potential clients, could include Osama bin Laden, if he is ever captured. "My first reaction was, Is somebody trying to torpedo my career?" Gunn, a colonel in the Air Force, recalled recently. "It occurred to me that there would be people who would not be able to understand how I could represent individuals who are characterized as enemies of the United States."
Gunn, a career military lawyer, is forty-five years old and African-American. At six feet seven, he is used to viewing things from a distance, and he made a thorough evaluation of the opportunity that had been presented to him. "For me, a critical component of how I make decisions is I try to weigh the costs from a rational and intellectual standpoint, and I also pray about it," he said. Many friends advised him against taking the job, and his pastor was noncommittal. "We really don't know what God is trying to do," the pastor told Gunn.
The son of a high-school teacher and a social worker from Fort Lauderdale--and a graduate of the Air Force Academy and of Harvard Law School--Gunn has made steady progress through the military hierarchy; many of his colleagues thought the tribunal job would not help if he wanted to be promoted to general. Still, Gunn said, "I felt I could do the job well. I believe that the greatest risk to the country is that these trials could be conducted in such a way where the world's perception is that they are illegitimate proceedings. What I would bring to the table, I believe, is that I could divorce myself from concern about career advancement, and I could focus on doing my utmost to see that the process was in fact legitimate by pursuing a zealous defense." So when the general counsel to the Department of Defense offered Gunn the job, in January of 2003, he accepted. He now supervises a staff of six lawyers, from behind a set of unmarked doors in an anonymous office building close to the Pentagon.
More than two years after the September 11th attacks, the Bush Administration's approach to the legal aspects of its war on terrorism resembles its diplomatic and military strategy: aggressive, unilateral, and unapologetic. Gunn and his staff therefore find themselves in an awkward position, risking criticism for assisting some of the least popular clients in the West and for participating in a game rigged against those clients. Because the tribunals are likely to begin soon, Gunn's role has taken on new urgency. The Department of Defense has almost finished establishing the procedures for the tribunals, and the Bush Administration has designated six of the Guantanamo detainees as the probable first defendants. In the spring, the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments on a separate request by several prisoners, represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights and a private law firm, that they be allowed to challenge, in the American courts, their continued incarceration. But the absence of legal proceedings, as much as the cases themselves, may illustrate more about the Administration's war on terror--and about the place of the rule of law in this new kind of war.
Paradoxes abound in Guantanamo Bay. It's in Cuba, but almost no one speaks Spanish. It's a focus of international attention, but the hardest thing for many of the Americans who work there is the boredom. Some of these peculiarities can be traced to the origins of the American presence there in the Spanish-American War. After American and Cuban forces evicted the Spanish from the island in 1898, United States forces remained on forty-five square miles along the southern coast, an idyllic patch of Caribbean coastline where four-foot-long iguanas may startle unwary pedestrians.
The American...
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