Underwear Diplomacy.(The Talk of the Town)(smuggled men's wear)

The civil-rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith is fond of citing the ironies of the justice system as administered by the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay: cellblocks, for Muslim prisoners, named Romeo and Whiskey; mandatory reporting of traffic accidents involving iguanas on the premises; the ferry from the civilian portion of the island to the prisoners' zone playing Jimmy Buffett's "Margaritaville" on a continuous loop. Stafford Smith represents thirty-five inmates at Guantanamo and has made nineteen trips there in the past three years, but perhaps the most bizarre of his experiences occurred in August, when, as the Washington Post reported, he received a letter from the United States Navy suggesting that he and another attorney had smuggled a pair of Under Armour compression-fit underpants (providing, according to the company's Web site, superior "moisture management") and a Speedo bathing suit to one of their clients. Stafford Smith's response to the Navy struck a note of incredulity. "As you know, anything we take in is searched and there is a camera in the room," he wrote in a letter. "Does someone seriously suggest that Mr. Katznelson or I have been stripping off to deliver underpants to our clients?"

On a recent afternoon, over drinks, it was suggested to Stafford Smith that such an antic approach (he had also wondered, in the letter, whether Guantanamo officials thought that his client wanted a Speedo "to paddle around in the only pool available to him, his privy") might belittle the gravity of his cause, which basically derives from the conviction that no human being should willingly do harm to another. (Stafford Smith, who was born in England, was awarded an Order of the British Empire in 2000 for two decades of work defending death-row inmates, mostly in Louisiana.) A rangy, quick-witted man with a quizzical air, he scoffed at the suggestion that serious times demand self-seriousness. "If you take everything that the government does in earnest," he said, "you'll slit your wrists. When you're dealing with an absurd system, you've got to point out the absurdities."

As if Speedogate, as some bloggers took to calling the incident, weren't bizarre enough, on September 10th Stafford Smith received an e-mail titled "Briefs for Briefs." It said, in part:

Dear Clive,, . . . I read the exchange of correspondence re: under armour and speedos. . . . Anyway here's an offer. , 2000 pairs of scrunchable (more easily smuggled if ...