Introduction

“You there!” The harried-looking man pointed at me. “How much do you weigh?”

            I hesitated. I still hadn’t gotten used to being asked for my weight by a random stranger (who would?), although it wasn’t something entirely new to me. The difference was back then I was giving measurements (along with my headshot and a whole host of other vital statistics printed on a five-by-seven card) to a casting director with hopes that I’d get booked for a modeling gig. Now I was being asked for my weight by a no-nonsense man in a rumpled flight uniform on the tarmac of the Fort Lauderdale airport. Then I’d possibly be landing my next photo shoot. Now I was boarding a teeny prop plane that would land at a supermax military prison on the island of Cuba.

            Destination: Guantanamo.

            After a fleeting urge to fib my weight by a few pounds (a former model’s first instinct), I answered the question truthfully. I’d already proffered the bundle of military passes and special security documents that proved I had permission tobe on the base. Giving a somewhat accurate weight was important; our little ten-seater plane had to be balanced. God forbid my vanity cause an improperly balanced plane to crash!

            My fellow travelers and I lined up in the order directed and filed up the short stairs toward our seats, grasping our earplugs, hoping that neither we nor our neighbors would have to pee for the next three hours and forty-five minutes, since using the bathroom was a process that included a foldable screen and chamber pot. To avoid even the slightest need to go, I had abstained from any liquids upon arriving at the airport three hours earlier. But as I sat, legs crossed, I couldn’t help but think of the clients I was about to visit, who had to “do their business” without any privacy every single day, and had for the last several years that they’d spent in the custody of the United States.

            This trip wasn’t my first time traveling to the Guantanamo U.S. Naval Base—I’d been there eight or nine times before over the past year, after more than two and a half years of trying to convince the U.S. courts that the detainees at Guantanamo had a right to habeas corpus, which is essentially the right to challenge one’s detention. To this day, each time I head to Terminal Four, I am bemused by irony: The airline that flies to Gitmo, nicknamed for Guantanamo’s military abbreviation, GTMO—home to possibly the most infamous prison camp in the entire world—is named Air Sunshine.

As I anxiously awaited the plane’s take-off, my thoughts drifted once again to my clients—some of Gitmo’s “enemy combatant” detainees (a label invented by the U.S. to justify holding prisoners without a trial)—and I wondered what they would think of the name of the airline I had to fly on to reach them. Considering the details of the treatment they receive at the hands of the U.S., I don’t think they’d be amused, and I don’t blame them.

            Once in the air, I spent my time listening to my iPod and gazing down at the ocean, which never went out of sight during the entire flight because our little plane was too small to fly above the clouds. Thankfully I managed to avoid using the chamber pot and privacy screen; not surprisingly, every single passenger refused a drink of soda or water offered by the co-pilot, who also served as a flight attendant. We listened as the co-pilot/flight attendant took us through his pre-flight routine, telling us where the life vests and floating seat cushions were stored should we have to make an emergency landing. I always paid attention to this part, as I affectionately call the kind of planes Air Sunshine flies “buckets o’ bolts.”

            Despite having grown up riding the same kind of small, loud planes built for four passengers during my Alaskan childhood, my confidence in them remains low. It’s definitely not boosted by the fact that planes flying to Guantanamo give Cuba a wide berth, since American planes are not allowed into Cuban air space—which turns what should be a quick, ninety-mile flight from Miami into a nearly four-hour flight on a tiny turbo prop plane. I sigh heavily on each flight when the base comes into focus; an island of browns and faded greens. And metal.

            The Gitmo “airport” is mostly just a big airplane hangar—the military base at Guantanamo straddles a river that empties into a bay on the southeastern tip of the island. One side of the bay, the leeward side, hosts the airport and the lodging for the lawyers representing detainees, including the legal team from Shearman & Sterling I have traveled with—Tom Wilner and Neil Koslowe. The windward side of the bay is home to the majority of the base, where we’re not allowed to go without a military escort, along with a McDonald’s, a small Pizza Hut, a Wal-Mart-like superstore called the Naval Exchange (NEX), the “chow hall” (the cafeteria that serves free food to service members), and a couple of generic restaurants, serving Applebee’s-style food and run by government contractors.

            When you land at Guantanamo, you show your passport to the gun-toting soldiers who greet your plane and hand over your security documents—a “theater clearance” and an “area clearance”—to prove you have authorization to both be on the base and in the area of the base that houses the detention center. Once those have been scrutinized and accepted, passengers get in line to have their luggage searched. The soldiers look for anything suspicious or that isn’t allowed on the base—although conveniently for them (and inconveniently for you), there’s no written list of forbidden items, so you’re not really sure what they are looking for—and honestly, I don’t think they are, either.

Once we landed, I stood by, watching and wondering if any of my personal belongings would be suspect. As required, I turned on my laptop computer, and then turned it off again once it booted up. I’m not really sure what the soldiers ascertain by that exercise, but I learned on my first few trips to Gitmo that it’s better not to ask. If you have a digital camera, soldiers will ask you to show them the last few pictures on it, and if you have taken pictures of the island from the plane, they will automatically be deleted. The principle underlying the entire Guantanamo operation (at least from a civilian point of view) is that there are no rules that you know about until you may possibly be violating them. And those rules can change whenever.

            The soldiers rifled through my stuff, pulling out bras, underwear, and other girly items, and I snuck a glance at Tom, who smiled like an idiot at the free peep show. I whispered to him to shut up and watched as one soldier sifted through the rest of my things, trying as hard as he could to search through my underwear with his surgeon-gloved hands without actually touching it, trying to look official and succeeding at looking very uncomfortable instead. I sort of felt bad for him, but at the same time, wondered what I could pack next time that might make him blush or at least crack a smile. I didn’t have much time to come up with any funny ideas though because suddenly another soldier lifted out a plastic bag and immediately turned toward me. My heart quickened.

            “What’s this?” he asked menacingly, holding up the contents.

            “Those are my vitamins,” I explained. And then, as if I needed some justification to have the offending vitamins in my possession, I stuttered, “I’m an athlete; a runner. I take them to stay healthy.”

            They really were vitamins, but I felt as guilty as if I’d been caught with five pounds of heroin. Being on a military base, representing “the enemy” while surrounded by U.S. soldiers, made me feel anxious about everything I did or said under their watchful eyes. Somehow, just being at Guantanamo made me feel like a prisoner myself. The soldier grunted and went back to his job. My heartbeat eventually slowed down to a normal pace while I waited for them to finish up.

            After all of our bags were searched, we climbed into a white school bus, which offered no air conditioning in the hundred-degree heat, and only slight relief by way of a breeze from the half of the windows that were stuck in the “down” position. We were dropped off at the CBQ (Combined Bachelors Quarters) where a mix of civilians and some visiting low-ranking military folk stay at Guantanamo. The Philipinos who have been contracted by the government to run the CBQ greeted us enthusiastically; they remembered that I am half-Philipino and that we always tip them well, giving them a twenty or so and leaving them candy and other food items that we buy here but don’t consume during our stay.

            On this trip, I was particularly nervous. The last time I’d been at Guantanamo, six or eight weeks before, I’d met with Abdullah, one of my favorite clients, and our conversation had not gone well . . .

            “How are you?” I’d asked. It’s an awkward question to ask a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, but it was necessary.           

“Not well,” Abdullah said, tossing hot sauce on vegetarian pie from Pizza Hut we’d brought for him. “I want to give you something.”

            “Don’t you want to hear how things are going?” I asked, immediately concerned. I could tell by his tone that he really wasn’t OK. Abdullah always tried to keep a positive outlook about his situation, despite the constant setbacks. On that day, however, his mood was far from positive.

            “No,” he answered. “Only if you have news about my family.” Abdullah had four children, the youngest of which had been born after he’d been picked up by the U.S. He’d been at Guantanamo for over four years already. His baby daughter was growing into a little girl, and he was missing everything.

            My memory flashed to the day the Supreme Court decision came out—when the justices decided our clients had a right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts. I knew the decision meant I would get to visit my clients, but on that day, it was difficult to envision the reality and magnitude of sitting opposite an alleged “enemy combatant” whose waist and feet were chained to the floor in a cell at Guantanamo. And certainly, when Tom first called me into his office just six months after 9/11 to ask what I thought about the potential case, I would never have expected that our conversation would lead to me visiting the most infamous prison in the world. Not even in law school, filled with energy and idealist notions of serving the public interest, had I imagined I would ever know what it felt like to be part of a case that would be heralded as the most significant civil rights case in the last twenty years.

So there I was, facing Abdullah, a man who had once been on the Kuwait national soccer team, a man who had traveled across Europe, a somewhat-Westernized Muslim, who had been accused of being a terrorist because he’d traveled to Pakistan wearing a watch that was common among Arab men (including some terrorists), with $10,000 in cash that he planned to donate to a charitable organization. Abdullah was about twenty-eight or thirty then, and a really nice guy from what I could tell. But trying to speak with him that day, it was evident his entire demeanor had changed. He looked defeated, exhausted. He was giving up, and I could tell.

             “I want to give you something,” he repeated. “I just don’t think I can take it anymore, and I want you to read this to my family.”

            I was shocked. As he handed me a letter he had written—basically his last will and testament—my mind raced. I’d heard about threats of suicide from other clients before, but never expected it from Abdullah, who had a lot of hope that things would work out, that he’d get the chance to prove his innocence and be released back to his family in Kuwait. He had a lot more hope than some of our other clients, that was for sure.

            I read the letter slowly, trying to figure out what to say to him. Could I be both his lawyer and his friend? His savior? “Give me a chance, Abdullah,” I pleaded, although I took his letter for safekeeping just in case. “Just a few more months. Just wait a few months. I think things are finally going to turn in your favor.”

            I wasn’t simply stalling: The Kuwaiti ambassador had recently told us that a few more Kuwaitis would be released back to Kuwait custody. I was sure Abdullah would be one of them, but I was afraid to be that explicit. I needed to buy more time without giving him false hope; I knew he wouldn’t give me a second chance if I was too specific about his release this go-around. We talked a little longer about his wife and family, and his soccer playing days—and finally, Abdullah agreed. He would wait. He could stick it out a little longer.          

            I wondered what the situation would be like in a few more months. When I returned then, would Abdullah have been released as promised, or would he still be at Guantanamo? Would he still be alive? Would the government even tell me if he was dead? I doubted it; they hadn’t told us when our clients had gone on a hunger strike.

            I’d never been in a position before where I’d felt like my own government could have such control over me. But at Gitmo, the U.S. government is the sole authority; the police and military back it up. At Gitmo, there is not a whole lot you can do about anything, no matter what a court back in Washington, D.C., may think you or your client are entitled to. At Gitmo, every part of life—mine and my clients’—is subject to military authority.

            The only time I’d ever felt similarly was during the time I’d spent in Angola, feeling fairly helpless with my own persona non grata status. The civil war there had put me at risk of being picked up at any time and labeled an “enemy combatant.” In fact, I was the enemy, being an American citizen. I was in no way a terrorist, but I recognized that I could’ve been perfectly innocent—as Abdullah said that he was—and have been picked up in a war-torn third world country and detained by mistake.

How did I get from there to here? How am I going to help this guy? I wondered to myself. I knew it would take all of my strength, all of my perseverance, and every single lesson I’d learned throughout my life to come up with the right answer.