By A Nose.(The Talk of the Town)(Janet Hamlin)

When Janet Hamlin first went to Guantanamo Bay to work as a courtroom sketch artist, in April of 2006, she was forbidden to draw the faces of detainees in any detail, as part of the Pentagon's efforts to comply with the Geneva Conventions. By the time of her second trip, a year later, the Pentagon had decided to allow detailed drawings of those detainees who had been formally charged with war crimes. Soon, Hamlin found herself seated directly behind the Australian terrorist suspect David Hicks, who had grown an enormous, view-obstructing mop of hair. "He looked like a caveman," Hamlin said the other day, while sitting in her home studio, in Nyack. "I said, 'I have to draw his face. I can't just draw the back of his head and show Cousin Itt. Can I move?' "

Guantanamo visit No. 5 took place in early June, when the prison's most famous inmate, the alleged terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed--K.S.M. to the staff--was due in court. After a harrowing flight aboard a C-130 Hercules ("It looks like something you would see in an old John Wayne movie--it's like a flying garage"), Hamlin was escorted to a viewing room, separated from the court by glass. No binoculars or other visual aids were allowed, and audio was piped in on a twenty-second delay. "So it was like watching a bad Japanese movie," she said. "Imagine yourself in a room behind the court, and K.S.M. was probably a few trees back," she continued, looking out the window toward her back yard, where her dog, Molly, was yelping to be let in. "He had these big goggles on, with an elastic safety strap, and he would do this occasionally"--she craned her neck and raised her hand to an imaginary set of goggles--"and then look at me, as if posing." Hamlin was surprised at K.S.M.'s vanity, given his famously unkempt appearance upon his apprehension, in 2003, but in captivity he had acquired a dignified look: much leaner, and with a Merlinesque gray beard. Hamlin did her best to sketch a decent likeness, but the goggles and the beard may have blinded her to the subtleties of his facial features. She gave him "quite the beak," she admitted.

K.S.M. was not pleased. During a ...