The very term “Gitmo” – referring to the controversial
Guantanamo Bay detainment facility – conjures up powerful and disturbing images that strike at the heart of America’s current political divide. The camp has drawn strong criticism both in the U.S. and worldwide for its detainment of prisoners without trial, as well as allegations of torture – but to date only a tiny handful of outsiders have actually been allowed to enter its gates.
One of those few is Jared Goldstein, an associate professor
at Roger Williams. How did Goldstein – a former associate at Shearman & Sterling in Washington, D.C., who now teaches constitutional and environmental law – end up becoming one of the first civilian lawyers allowed into Guantanamo?
His journey began just five months after the 9/11 terrorist
attacks, when his firm was approached by several Kuwaiti families – wives, parents, and children of detainees at Guantanamo – to represent the prisoners. Shearman & Sterling agreed, thus becoming the first U.S. law firm to undertake this challenge.
“It’s not like American lawyers were lining up for a chance
to represent these guys,” Goldstein explained. “In the political climate of the time, it wasn’t exactly a popular cause.”
Making Contact
The government fought back hard, claiming detainees had no
right to habeas corpus, to attorneys, or to confidential conferences with
attorneys. Goldstein – an appellate specialist – was brought into the picture when the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. The favorable decision that followed in June 2004 (Rasul v. Bush ) cleared the way for representation, and – by the time a slew of lesser hurdles thrown up by the government was cleared at lower court levels – Goldstein was “very heavily involved” with the cases.
“So two and a half years passed before we were finally able
to meet the detainees,” Goldstein said. “Most of them had no idea we’d even been working for them, no idea of our existence – so when we met we were strangers; they had no reason to trust us. How did they know who we were? To convince them we were legitimate, we made a DVD of their families [in a Kuwaiti law office] introducing us as their lawyers.”
Some of the prisoners were convinced by the DVD; others
weren’t so sure, fearing that their families had been coerced. They asked for DVDs filmed in their respective homes, with their families introducing the lawyers in a familiar setting. After the government minutely screened the recordings for any coded messages or other objectionable content, Goldstein returned to Gitmo to meet his clients.
“Showing the detainees these DVDs was one of the most
emotional things I ever experienced,” Goldstein said. “These men were seeing wives, children, parents, brothers and sisters, for the first time in years; babies born while they were in confinement. It was wrenching, because these people were generally very stoic – broken by three years of solitary confinement and other deprivations.”
The Flimsiest Of Pretenses
Goldstein maintains there is no legal or factual basis for
holding most of the detainees, including his clients.
“Ninety percent of the Guantanamo detainees were simply in
the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said. “At most, ten percent are al Qaeda – but there’s no way of knowing which ten percent. So the best thing to do [in the government’s opinion] is simply to hold them all indefinitely. Better safe than sorry. No one wants to be the one to release a bad guy, so it’s safest to just keep them all at Gitmo – and often on the flimsiest of pretenses.”
Goldstein said the detainees were held in six-by-nine-foot
rooms crammed with a toilet, bed, and florescent lights left on 24 hours a day – and all meals taken in the cell as well.
“They were all given a Koran, but no newspapers, magazines,
or books,” he added. “One described it as being locked in a bathroom for five years with nothing to do. And that does not even take into account the
interrogation techniques they face day in and day out, whether legally or not.”
An Uphill Battle
Goldstein left Shearman & Sterling in 2005 to teach at
Roger Williams. Today, of the 12 Kuwaitee detainees he represented, eight are back in Kuwait; the others will probably soon follow. “Really, the only way anyone is released is through a deal with their home country,” he explained.
Goldstein and his law school colleague Peter Marguiles
recently teamed with partners Deming Sherman and Pat Sullivan of Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge, to represent another Gitmo detainee (this one from Afghanistan). Other joint representations are anticipated as the complex legal battles involving detainees continues to unfold.
In the meantime, Goldstein says his teaching at RWU is “fed
in a million ways” by his Guantanamo work, particularly his classes on
constitutional law. “The issues I’ve worked on come up in class in a very direct and literal way,” he explained.
“I got involved [with the detainee cases] based on an
abstract principle that is worth fighting for,” Goldstein said. “But actually
going there and meeting these people gave these cases a very different flavor for me. It’s hard to get away from the knowledge that with every technical delay, every day that passes – every minute, even as we sit here talking – my client is still stuck down there in Guantanamo, thousands of miles from home and family, locked in a bathroom.”
