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"The Guantnamo military commission for accused USS Cole
bombing mastermind [DEFENDANT] had its first, but certainly
not its last, secret session last Friday, June 14.
According to ...[MEDIA], the hearing was 78 minutes long,
and was closed both to the public and to the defendant.
The subject of the hearing, and the title of the government
motion being argued, were also classified. Defense counsel
were permitted to attend but [DEFENDANT'S] attorney... told
[MEDIA], There was a secret session. Thats all I can
say.
----------------------------------------------------------
When the public found out what was in Motion 92, there was
so much outrage that of course the protests began, and the
letter writing campaign, and the talk shows, and the
indignant editorials which almost nobody read, but theywere indignant. The outrage rose and rose and the protests
dominated the nightly news, and it was clear that somebody
was going to have to resign.
Or not, because the other idea was to arrest the reporter
and charge her with treason, and so that was done.
The reporter was arrested in the middle of the night as her
children watched from the top of the stairs, charged and
held without bail as a flight risk because she had oncebeen to Portugal, held until she named her sources which
she did not, and so she was summarily executed, which would
have been expected to cause further commotion but for the
fact that the execution was disguised as a suicide, a plan
so brilliantly pulled off in the details, right down to the
suicide note written in a reasonable facsimile of the
reporter's own penmanship, that the public did not get any
more incensed.
With the suicide of the reporter, it was claimed that
Motion 92 was not in fact even a real thing, and it was
likely that the reporter had fabricated the entire idea
that there even WAS a Motion 92, and after several press
conferences to explain this, the matter died back down, and
finally even the few straggling protesters who were camped,
day and night, outside the White House's South Lawn fence,
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went on to other matters.
Everything in the preceding paragraphs is true except for
the things that are not.
Things that are NOT true include
1. the public outrage over Motion 92. There was no public
outrage because there was no public Motion 92.
1a. Even if Motion 92 had been made public the
outrage itself would likely still have been missing.
Things that ARE true include:
2. There was a Motion 92. That much we know. Or maybe wedo not. We know that we think that there was a Motion 92,
and if Motion 92 existed, then maybe its story might be
like this one.
Or maybe not.
Maybe this story is pure fiction.
Maybe this story is pure fact.
How can you tell!
The use of that exclamation point was intentional. Nobody
uses question marks anymore.
...THE.....................................................
...........................................................
.... DEFENSE
...........ATTORNEY........................................
...........................................................
............
She was not sure, until that day, whether she was what her
old law professor with his bald spot and his too-short tie
and his habit of calling on her when she wasn't paying
attention would have termed a 'plumber' or a 'lawyer.'
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'Plumbers make the water go where the customer wants it to
go!' the man would say to the class, and then he would call
on someone who had been paying attention, allowing the
others (including the defense attorney who was not yet then
an attorney) to develop a false sense of security and they
(including her) would, eventually, stop paying attention.
Then he would call on her.
(Plumbers make the water go where the customer wants it to
go, the professor would explain. Lawyers give advice.
Plumbers just take instruction. "Be a lawyer!" he would
tell them. Some students wrote that down.)
The defense attorney sat up late that night, the night
before she wrote Motion 92, reading the same three sheetsof paper over and over again.
They weren't even that long to read!
They were three 8 1/2-inch by 13-inch long sheets of paper
that had rolled out of the secure fax machine somewhere,
probably Langley Virginia, she knew, and she spent a
moment, the night before she wrote Motion 92, contemplating
the journey the papers themself had made: from their birth
as indiscrete parts of a tree, probably in the PacificNorthwest, to sawmill, to paper pulping company near Green
Bay, Wisconsin, separating from the mass of soupy gulp that
had been a tree into three individual sheets of paper,
eventually.
Bundled into a ream with thousands of their brethren, the
three had sat quiescent as they rode a semitrailer truck
carrying them to an office supplies warehouse in Maryland,
only to then sit on a pallet for several months, in the
dark hot dusty quiet, until a government procurement truck
had the pallet forklifted onto it, to drive the whole crowd
of papers down the highway across the Chesapeake and around
the Beltway, making stops at a series of nondescript
buildings with windows that you could see out of but not
into.
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At each stop, the compatriots were thinned out, until the
box with these three in it was set underneath the secure
fax machine.
One day, their sleeve was opened, and they lay, in the
middle of a group of friends, waiting until the three of
them were pulled, headfirst, through the wringer and
received only a nominal amount of printing on them, coming
to rest, slightly curled and hot, in a receiving tray that
was closely watched by a dedicated secretary with second-
level clearance, whose sole job it was to make sure that
none of these papers sat untouched and unseen for long,
lest they be picked up by people who had no business
picking them up and/or seeing them.
Before the three papers had even cooled off, the lawyer
knew, the sheets had been scooped up into a manila envelopewhich was sealed, and carried by hand down the hallway. The
elevator would have been required; these three sheets of
paper, which had heretofore spent their entire existence
(as separate cells in a tree, as part of a pulpy froth, and
then as thin layers in a box) in a nondescript fashion, had
risen in importance once they were tattooed with their
message, brief though it was, and had therefore earned the
right to be carried in that manila envelope down the hall,
by personal escort (the escort was pretty, in the
businesslike way that such women are, women who are willingto go through the privations of obtaining and working in a
classified job they cannot discuss at the clubs they go to
on Fridays, without obtaining at the same time the
accompanying higher pay and importance that usually goes
with such classified jobs. A security clearance, once a
thing of importance that marked its bearer as a person of
some significance, not to say also some wealth although
that was true, too, no longer meant such things. These
days, it simply meant that one could park outside of the
nondescript buildings on weekdays without a pass, and also
that one was not allowed to take one's work home, which
generally meant longer hours in the nondescript buildings
because the work multiplied and multiplied.)
The papers rode with the pretty, businesslike, second-tier
security-classified secretary whose job it was to do this,
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on the elevator, to a level reachable only by a key, which
the secretary possessed. There were only 11 such keys in
existence and they could not be copied because they did not
leave the building.
The secretary turned her key in to the security guard whose
own classified level she did not know, but who she
suspected must have one higher than her own because he kept
the keys. The papers sat quietly in their envelope, not
knowing the elevator they rode in had a security camera
with a fisheye lens in two separate corners and when the
doors opened the papers were not aware that they were
carried into a small lobby with three doors leading off of
it, and an armed guard at a desk.
The guard checked the secretary's badge and waited untilhis computer said it was okay and then motioned her to the
left, where the secretary walked through a door that slid
open to find a man standing with his back to her and
talking on a headset.
The man looked at her and saw the manila envelope, and he
took the three papers out of it, glanced at them briefly,
then glanced at them with more concern.
He would have sighed, but men who occupy that office do notsigh.
Why should they! Even bad news is not ever bad news!
And so he did not sigh but he told the secretary that the
papers should be taken to the Sergeant for delivery.
From there, the defense attorney knew, the papers had been
put into a different sealed envelope, transferred from
person to person and never left alone or unattended or
sitting on a desk, until they had made their way to...
...her.
She was a bit hazy, when it came from the man in the office
telling the Sergeant to deliver them, because ordinarily
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they would then go to the prosecutor who would be able to
look at them at his leisure, day after day (although they
were only a few days old, according to the time-stamp)
until one day he would have leaned across the table
where he sat every day to hand them to her, and then she
would have been allowed to keep them from when they were
given to her until she had to give them back, an hour,
maybe, or the afternoon, or even a night, but probably not
a whole night.
These three papers that had never been left alone in their
entire life, she felt certain, but she also know that the
papers had not come to her from the prosecutor, had instead
been in a sealed envelope in her trailer, this morning.
The defense attorney knew the three papers were not hers tokeep, and so she created her own set of three DIFFERENT
papers. Unlike the three papers she had known so briefly,
looking at them in her trailer on the edge of a rocky bay
on the side of Cuba, the three papers the lawyer brought to
life had a name.
The name the papers had is not known to us anymore.
The name the papers created by the defense attorney, in her
trailer on the edge of Guantanamo Bay, a trailer thatserved as an office and part-time living quarters for her,
had once, was typed onto the three newpapers and whispered
by the defense attorney as she typed them on her laptop
(for she was allowed a laptop provided it did not have an
Internet connection, and this laptop was not allowed to
leave with her when she took the plane back to her home in
Florida every Friday) whispered by her as she typed it up,
and then after being typed, and whispered, was never spoken
again, and that name did not matter because the
three newpapers were given a new name the very next
morning, when the defense attorney took them in and handed
them to the prosecutor.
As per protocol, the papers were not copied in advance. The
defense attorney did not have a copier.
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The papers were not saved to her hard drive. She was not
allowed to save documents on her computer without advance
permission from the Tribunal.
She had not printed any copies of the papers, as she was
not allowed to print multiple copies without permission.
The tribunal watched as the defense attorney handed the
three newpapers to the prosecutor, and handed back, too,
the three papers she had been given the day before,
She watched as the prosecutor looked at the three NEW
papers he had been handed, then at the three OLD papers,
which he looked at, looked at again, looked away from, then
back again, and only after all of that were they handed to
the assistant prosecutor, who filed them in the box on thetable.
All of this doneunder the watchful eyes of the two
military policemen who stood behind the defense counsel's
table at all times.
The prosecutor looked at the threenewpapers, read through
them, then read through them again, and only after he had
read them, and only after he had handed them to his
assistant to read, did he turn to the tribunal, who waspatiently waiting for the prosecutor to begin the day's
proceedings, and say:
"There's a motion we may need to hear."
The tribunal looked interested, and the prosecutor's
assistant walked the three newpapers up, carefully hiding
their name from the others in the room -- the others being
only the prosecutor himself, the tribunal, the defense
attorney, and the two military policemen. Today's
proceedings in the trial of the defendant would not require
the presence of the defendant.
The tribunal looked at the three papers, and, having read
them through only once, handed them back to the
prosecutor's assistant, who bore them back to the
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prosecutor, who tucked them carefully into a manila folder
near the back of the banker's box on his desk.
"Motion 92 will be scheduled for hearing," the tribunal
said.
......................................THE..................
............PROSECUTOR.....................................
...........................................................
..................
Motion 92 sat, untouched, in its own section of the file
folders maintained by the prosecutor throughout the
remainder of the day's proceeding. The prosecutor that day
argued the minutiae of what would happen the next day, when
the defendant might be present at the defendant's trial.Almost one hour was devoted to the question of whether the
additional security detail -- three other military police
and an enlisted man -- would be allowed to stand before the
bar and behind the defense table or if they would have to
stand behind the bar, in the row of chairs that was never
filled by anyone other than military police and enlisted
men.
There were five chairs, each identical, behind the half-
wall that was traditional in courtrooms and so one had beeninstalled here, a bit of tradition in an entirely
nontraditional setting. It was traditional to have a half-
wall -- the bar -- separate the public from the
participants in court. Hence, the people who had built the
courtroom had put in a half-wall, stained it dark brown and
installed a swinging gate through which the lawyers could
walk when they entered from the main entrance at the back
of the courtroom, passing by the five plastic chairs, three
on the left and two on the right, that had been taken from
the enlisted men's mess and which, as noted, had never been
sat in. There was never a public to sit in them, making the
bar irrelevant.
Eventually, the tribunal decided that the prosecutor was
right and that for security reasons, the military police
men on security detail for the defendant, as well as the
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enlisted man, would stand before the bar and behind the
defense table.
"What about attorney-client privilege!" the defense
attorney demanded, but the tribunal merely shuffled the
papers on the bench and moved on to the next order of
business, a request to increase the time delay on the
broadcast of proceedings to the press corps by 5 seconds,
to 40 seconds. This was argued for 20 minutes, with the
prosecutor insisting that it was necessary for protection
of classified material and that it would not impose a
significant burden on the reporters who attended the
proceedings, as they likely would not even realize the
additional delay was present.
When asked whether she took a stance on the motion, thedefense attorney attempted a smile that did not quite come
off as such, and said "The defense continues to request
that there be no delay in publication to the press and
notes its continued objection to the delay as well as to
the silencing button."
The tribunal no longer, when the defense made such
objections, reflexively looked to where a stenographer
would sit if there were a stenographer in the courtroom.
"Objection noted," the tribunal said, and moved on to the
next order of business.
The trial proceedings that day lasted only six hours and
fourteen minutes and so when the prosecutor and his
assistant walked out of the courtroom, just behind the
defense attorney, the air was still hot and bright in the
way that air only seemed to be in Guantanamo Bay.
The prosecutor squinted as he saluted the military
policeman who held the door for him, waited in the sunlight
for his eyes to adjust but they never quite did, he
squinted everywhere he went here in the base, the light
almost an assault on the eyes. It was as if there wasn't
enough here to absorb all the ambient sunlight: the absence
of trees, and grass, and the few people here -- less than
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200 prisoners, only about 1,500 soldiers, with less than a
hundred support staff, all in an area about the size of one
of those new suburban communities where all the houses were
shaped like Frank Lloyd Wright knockoffs and there was a
bakery and a hair styling salon in the small commercial
building at the entrance to the area -- but none of that
was here, of course, there were only barracks and wooden
buildings bleached by sun and wire fences topped with coils
that would slice your hand off from twenty feet away,
seemingly -- the sunlight waiting around, aimlessly, as if
the lack of things for the it to land on and be absorbed by
had left an overabundance of sunlight drifting around,
unattached, and the effect was not pleasant, not at all:
all that extra sunlight glinted off barbed wire fences and
corrugated-metal walls and gun-gray vehicles and it
bleached everything, whited everything out, made everythingseem sanded down and duller, not reflective anymore, made
metal seem like rock and wood, where there was wood, seem
like metal and made rock seem like... whatever was coarser
and duller than rock, the prosecutor finally decided, his
own imagination having been beaten into submission by the
ambient light.
"Put that there," he said to the assistant, motioning to
the small table across from his desk in his office, which
was next door to the courtroom. He looked out the windowwhere he could see the defense attorney opening the door to
her trailer office/home, the military policeman going
before her to inspect it while she waited.
The assistant complied, and the prosecutor motioned him out
of the room. He glanced at his watch and then riffled
through the folders until he found Motion 92, which he then
pulled out.
Getting a bottle of water from the minirefrigerator beside
the table, he sat down on the threadbare, spartan loveseat
and read it.
It took less time to read it the second time than it had
the first. Motion 92 was economical in its use of wording,
and similarly thrifty in the references to supporting
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arguments it made, not only because of the short length of
time between when the defense attorney had been able to
read the three papers that had prompted it, but also
because of the lack of precedential cases upon which a
motion like Motion 92 could be based.
The prosecutor read it a second time,and then laid Motion
92 down on the couch next to him for a second and took a
sip of water.
"Well, shit," he said.
He got up and buzzed the secretary and told her to send in
the assistant prosecutor.
In moments the assistant was there.
"Well, shit," the prosecutor said again, and waved Motion
92 in the air for him.
"We need to respond to this," the prosecutor told him, "And
we need to do it quickly. I want something on paper by
tomorrow morning."
He thought for a second, and then changed his mind. "By
tonight. You get me a response by tonight, and I'll mark itup so that we can file it first thing tomorrow morning."
The assistant did not reach for Motion 92, not sure if he
had the proper clearance levels. The prosecutor looked at
it again, read the first page or two of the motion, and
then put it back in the folder.
"Here's what it says," the prosecutor said, sitting back
down on the couch, but before he began speaking, he got up
and looked out the windows, then closed the blinds so that
nobody could see in. He then walked to the doors, one on
each end of the office. He opened the one that led outside,
and glanced at the military policeman standing guard out
there.
"Five feet," he told the man.
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The guard nodded and walked forward the requisite number of
feet. At the other end of the office, the one that led
into the staff pool, he saw that nobody was in the room.
He closed the door, and turned back to the assistant,
detailing quickly and efficiently what was in Motion 92.
In less than 2 minutes, he had outlined the basic idea of
Motion 92 and what he wanted to do in response to it, at
least in court and at least for now. He then told the
assistant to get what he could by 1900 hours and ushered
him out the door. He watched until the assistant sat at
his desk and had opened up the secure laptop prosecutors
carried back and forth with them from the mainland to here.
"Turn that away from the window," he reminded theassistant, who complied, his back now to the inner wall and
his eyes on the laptop screen.
The prosecutor closed the door and went back to his desk.
He picked up the secure line and told the security detail
that tomorrow the defendant's presence would not be
necessary in court, and that there would be no hearing.
Then he hung up, and picked up again, dialed a different
number.
This number caused the line not to hook up to another phone
there on the corner of the island, but to instead link into
a cable that went underneath billions of gallons of ocean
water, a cable that had been buried in the rock of the
island, which had been dug up and carved out and laid open
enough to put the cable down inside the crust of the earth
itself, and which had then had concrete poured over it, new
rock replacing natural rock, hardening until there was an
as-near-impenetrable barrier between the sky and the sun
and the less-than-2000 people who lived here, only a few
of whom had anywhere near the necessary amount of freedom
of movement to even approach the cable, and fewer of whom
knew the cable was there.
From the rock, both manmade and God-made, that the cable
began its journey in, the cable went directly underwater,
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beginning with the wave-tossed deep edge of the ocean that
abutted directly onto the island, and moving downward
quickly to lie on the ocean floor, from a depth of only
forty feet near the rocky cliff where it left the island to
joint the sea to a depth of nearly a mile, until the cable
reached the mainland, where it traveled through a small bay
underwater until it rose up near a dock on a military base,
to leave the sea and begin again to live in the air and
land. From there it ran into a large box that was entered
and left by dozens of identical cables, not all of which
had any real purpose: some of them were extras in case they
were one day needed, and some of them were decoys, in case
someone were to get into the box and decide to try to
interrupt the cables' job, which was to convey information
from one place to another without interruption.
The cable ended at that box and another cable began, this
journey again diving into manmade rock until leaving the
ground some miles away from the military base in a
nondescript area near the Everglades, rising out of the
swamp amidst turtles and snakes and the odd feral housecat,
to seemingly join the network of cables and wires that were
strung all over the country. This particular cable did not
actually touch any other cable anywhere else in the
country; it did not associate with lesser brethren, the
types of wires and devices that would help send a phonecall from a little boy in Oklahoma to his grandmother in
Connecticut, or which would forward a list of funny cat
jokes from Los Angeles to Milwaukee. This cable was part of
a separate cadre of lines that was devoted solely to the
most important, most secret, most serious communications,
communications that were so significant and which carried
with them such potential for disaster if they reached the
wrong hands, that as few as approximately (for nobody konws
the exact number of people who hold security clearances) as
few as about 1,100,000 people in the entire country could
be cleared to know of the EXISTENCE of such information,
let alone to know what the information actually said.
These cables buzzed and hummed, day and night, with
information too dangerous, too new, too important, for
anyone but those (probably as few as) 1,100,000 people to
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be aware of, and they carried that information from
Guantanamo Bay, to Washington D.C., to Des Moines, Iowa, to
Las Vegas, Nevada, to Austin, Texas, to Butte, Montana, and
to 32 other places around the country, but 90% of the words
and images these cables carried went to nondescript office
buildings in Virginia, where the prosecutor's phone call
went.
"We need a courier," the prosecutor said to the man who
picked up the phone.
That was not what the cables carried. That was what the
prosecutor SAID, but the cables carried those words
scrambled and rescrambled and rescrambled on top of that,
and then when they reached their destination they were
unscrambled and unscrambled and unscrambled below that, themixing and remixing and unmixing having the curious effect
of flattening out the tones of the words, making them more
monotonous even than they had been, this low-uttered
sentence coming from the sunbeat rocks of Guantanamo Bay
and being said into the ears of a man sitting in a
windowless office in a nondescript building in Virginia.
---------------------------------
SIDEBAR-------------------------
Beauty is truth, truth is beauty, and neither is fact.
-----------------------------------------------------------
------
THE........................................................
...COURIER.................................................
...........................................................
..........................................
He stops exactly two feet from the elevator door. It is a
habit the courier has cultivated in hopes that someday,
someone will ask him "Why do you stop exactly two feet from
the elevator door?" If they do, he will answer them:
"Because if you stand too close to the elevator door, when
it opens, you can be surprised by someone just on the other
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side of the doorway, and they can get the drop on you
before you realize how close they are."
This questioner, having then mulled it over for a second or
two, would then say "Why don't you stand farther back,
then? That way they can't get you at all, even if you don't
know how close they are standing?"
To which he would reply:
"If I stand farther back, I can't see into the corners of
the elevator in case someone is hiding."
He would pause, and then add:
"And if I'm too far from the door, people can get out ofthe elevator quickly and I have no chance to stop them, so
they can spread out in the hallway before I know even how
many there are."
He would not add that two feet is the perfect distance:
close enough to block the door, grapple with an assailant,
or fall back -- but far enough to not be immediately
subject to attack. That part would be clear enough from
his statements, and the questioner would realize that the
courier was a man to be reckoned with.
Nobody had yet asked him, and the two-foot rule was not
part of his training -- not basic training, not Navy SEAL
training, not the three years of virtual doctoral classes
at a nondescript building almost identical to this one but
three blocks away and on the left, and not the five years
he had been on the job. It was of his own devising. He
often toyed with the idea of writing up the two-foot rule
in a memo and seeking to have it added to the training, but
(A) memos were discouraged in his division and (B) he
wasn't sure he wanted others to know about the two-foot
rule, in case they used it against him. He would likely --
likely!-- someday need to get the drop on someone coming
off an elevator.
Perhaps when he retired.
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The elevator door opens and he pauses for only a fraction
of a second, scanning the elevator, which has only one of
the standard-issue pretty, but slightly too short to be
'hot', secretaries who work in these buildings. Pretty
tall girls become models, beauty pageant contestants,
doctors. Pretty SHORT girls go to work in nondescript
office buildings where they can rise to the level of HR
director but no further.
He does not talk to her.
He gets off the elevator, and the remainder of his trip to
his destination is not worth talking about. Nor can he
talk about it at all, not to anyone, not even to his wife,
if he had one. He does not have one. She divorced him 7years ago, before he was promoted to his present position.
It was a perk of his present job that he was prohibited by
law from disclosing his position, his place of employment,
or his income, and so his child support and his alimony
remained unchanged, and when his ex-wife's lawyer wrote
letters to him seeking that information again, he provided
the letters to the in-house counsel whose office was on the
third floor of this very nondescript building with shaded
windows behind trees that had obviously been planted only
five years ago, and the in-house counsel would write backthat the information could not be provided because
[REGULATION] made it classified.
[REGULATION] is not a published regulation. You cannot
look it up online or in the printed versions of the Code Of
Federal Regulations. It exists only in administrative
directives issued by Secretaries, and when challenged a
version of the directive with an agency seal is provided,
but only for viewing. The citation for [REGULATION] is by
administrative decree not written down. It can be cited by
number only orally, not in writing. Challenges to refusals
to provide information under [REGULATION] may only be done
by petition to the District Court For Regulation Of
Security, pursuant to [RULE].
...........................................................
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.....THE.................................REPORTER..........
...........................................................
..........................................
When the defense attorney gets off the plane, she is tired
and somewhat bewildered.
She had left her trailer that morning to go to court and
arrived there only to be told by the military policeman
standing outside the door that the day's session was closed
to her.
"We are supposed to have a hearing today," she said. She
did not tell him that the hearing was about whether her
client could be force-fed during his hunger strike, as the
government insisted it had a right to keep her client aliveuntil he was found guilty and deported or executed.
She had thought about telling the tribunal that it would be
less expensive for the government to ship her client back
in a body bag, and that every version of the ending of the
trial would be the same, because whether her client
succeeded in starving himself to death, or whether the
government executed him, or whether it sent him back to one
of the countries it believed he should live in, the result
was the same; it was only the manner of achieving thatresult that was in doubt, but she had decided that such an
argument might be pushing it.
"The proceedings are closed," the military policeman said,
again.
"Not to me," she told him and reached for the handle.
"I'm sorry, ma'am. The proceedings are closed." The
military policeman nearly-imperceptibly moved, the smallest
hint of a shift to block just the barest edge of the door.
She had stood there, stymied, staring at him, for only a
few seconds, until the door had opened from inside. The
assistant prosecutor came out, glanced at her, and then
began walking to the office building. She spun after him
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and grabbed his arm.
"What's going on!"
"Closed hearings for the remainder of the week," the
assistant told her. Looking at her insignia on her
uniform, he belatedly saluted her. "Ma'am."
She could not get into the courtroom and waited outside the
door for a half-hour. The assistant prosecutor did not
come back. Nobody else came out. She went and sat back in
her trailer and watched the courtroom door, all day,
through the small slit of a window on that side. She did
not work on anything. She did not read her book that she
had brought with her to help her fall asleep at night. At
lunchtime, she ate some microwave popcorn and a warm rootbeer from her cupboard.
At four p.m., the prosecutor left the courtroom and she ran
out the door and intercepted him.
"What is going on!" Pause. "Sir!"
The prosecutor would not meet her eyes.
"Closed proceedings," he said.
He fumbled in the file he carried, and pulled out a sheet
of paper. He showed it to her. She read it:
------BY ORDER OF THE TRIBUNAL: COURT WILL BE CLOSED TO THE
PRESS, THE DEFENSE, AND ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF FOR THE
REMAINDER OF THE WEEK----------
When she reached for it, he said:
"[Regulation]" and put it back in his file.
And so she took the plane back to the mainland that night,
strapped to a seat in the cargo hold, with three enlisted
men and some administrative staff with accumulated leave
time and a reporter from the press pool who knew better
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than to ask her questions.
As she walked down the cargo ramp at the back of the plane
onto the tarmac, feeling the dense humidity of south
Florida wrap around her like a sweaty aunt's hug on the
Fourth Of July, a strange man walked up to her.
"[Name]" he said to her and she nodded.
The man took her by the wrist and with a glance at the
others coming down the cargo ramp to make sure they were
not close enough to hear, said in a voice that somehow
seemed to hit her not in the ear, but directly between her
shoulder blades:
"You are under arrest."
And looking as though he was escorting her off to dinner,
he led her to a car that was just off to the right of the
ramp. He opened the back door for her and allowed her to
start getting in and betrayed himself and his true purpose
to any onlookers only at the last moment, when he somewhat
roughly bent her head down to keep her from hitting it on
the car roof, as policeman have done since car roofs were
invented.
The door closed with the tight soft whisper of extreme
luxury and the car turned a quick, tight half-circle and
drove off.
The reporter stood on the bottom of the ramp coming off the
plane and felt his breathing get shallower. His chest
actually tightened.
He realized his mistake and started walking again, trying
to keep his gait normal. He walked over to the edge of the
tarmac, the wire-fenced gate manned by seven different
military policemen. He nodded to them and fumbled with his
credentials, proving who he was so that they would let
him out, even though the fenced-in place could only be
reached by airplane directly from Guantanamo Bay and this
was the only place from which planes left to go to
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Guantanamo Bay, so it was improbable to the point of
impossibility that he was not supposed to be there, but he
did not even joke about that.
Once outside he looked neither left nor right but went
directly to his car, wondering if he was right about what
he had seen and what it meant that he had seen it and what
it might mean if it meant that he was right about what he
had seen and then he drew a deep breath and told himself to
just have the one thought at a time or things were going to
get weird.
Going to!
He realized he was just sitting in his car and started it
up and did everything that he could to simply drive offwithout seeming as though he was in a hurry.
----------------------------------------
SIDEBAR------------------
Fingerprints on a bag containing detonating devices, found
by Spanish authorities following the Madrid commuter train
bombings, were initially identified by the FBI as belonging
to [ATTORNEY] ("100% verified").
According to the court documents in [TRIBUNAL]'s decision,
this information was largely "fabricated and concocted by
[AGENCY] and [AGENCY]". When the [AGENCY] finally sent
[ATTORNEY]'s fingerprints to the Spanish authorities, they
contested the matching of the fingerprints from [ATTORNEY]
to the ones associated with the Madrid bombing. Further,
the Spanish authorities informed the [AGENCY] they had
other suspects in the case, Moroccan immigrants not linked
to anyone in the USA. The [AGENCY] completely disregarded
all of the information from the Spanish authorities, andproceeded to spy on [ATTORNEY] and his family further.
As was discovered during the court case, even the
[AGENCY]'s own records show that this fingerprint, despite
the sworn testimony of [AGENCY] and [AGENCY] agents, was in
all reality not an exact match but only one of 20 "similar"
prints to the ones retrieved from Madrid. Based on that
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list of people with "similar prints" the [AGENCY] launched
an extensive investigation of all 20 individuals using
Letters of National Security. The investigation included
medical records, financial records, employment records,
etc. on all 20 people and their families. It was during
this time that [ATTORNEY]'s name rose to the top of the
list.
The [AGENCY] arrested [ATTORNEY] at his offices in West
Slope, an unincorporated suburb of Portland. The arrest was
under a material witness warrant rather than under charge;
he was held with no access to family and limited access, if
any, to legal counsel. The [AGENCY] initially refused to
inform either [ATTORNEY] or his family why he was being
detained or where he was being held.
Later, the [AGENCY] leaked the nature of the charges to the
local media and the family learned of the charges by
watching the local news. He was at first held at a County
jail under a false name; he was later transferred to an
unidentified location. His family protested that [ATTORNEY]
had no connection with the bombings, nor had he been off
the continent in over 11 to 14 years.
...........................................................
...........................................................
...........THE..........................TRIBUNAL...........
..........................................
"Sign this, please," the prosecutor said to the tribunal,
presenting him with two pieces of paper stapled together in
the top middle.
The tribunal glanced at it, and then looked up at the
prosecutor.
Reflexively, he glanced at the red button that could be
used to turn off the sound feed to the press room before
remembering that this session, too, was closed to the media
and nobody was in the adjoining room watching their lips
move and hearing the attendant sounds 40 seconds later.
He turned his gaze back to the prosecutor, who held the
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same rank as the tribunal, outside this room.
Inside this room, things were murkier.
The prosecutor nodded.
The tribunal read the pages again and then picked up a penoff his desk. He signed his name to the second of the two
pages and handed it back.
"[REGULATION]," he said.
The prosecutor nodded again, went back to his table, and
pulled out a sheaf of papers and notes. Thumbing through
them, he handed several over to the assistant prosecutor
and then took the remainder up to the tribunal.
"Offer Exhibit 1470-Prosecution," he said, pointing to the
sticker in one corner of the packet.
The tribunal had long ago stopped looking to the defense
table on such offers, even when the defense attorney was
there.
"Received," he said, and took the packet of papers.
"The whole thing." he said to the prosecutor who shook his
head.
"Start on page 3."
So the tribunal started on page three. It was a transcript
of a telephone call, with various words highlighted in a
manner that the tribunal now recognized as being search
terms; when a computer was told to search documents for
certain terms, it highlighted the ones it found and aprintout of those documents would have the words
highlighted on them. Page 3 was heavy with highlights.
The conversation itself was marked only as "Caller" and
"Recipient." He read through the transcript from Page 3
until the call turned to the subject of whether Strasburg
would be able to pitch the next day, and then looked up.
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"Motion 92," he said.
The prosecutor nodded again, and the tribunal later that
day signed two other orders.
.........THE...............................................
...........................................................
.....................................DEFENDANT.............
..........................................
Was woken up and abruptly moved from the cell he shared
with two other men.
...........................................................
.............................................THE...........
...........DESK.......................CLERK................
..........................................
The reporter ALMOST used his cell phone to try to call the
defense attorney but stopped himself just before hitting
"SEND."
Instead, he walked up to the desk clerk and asked her if
the hotel had a payphone.
"A what." the clerk said back to him.
She was only 18!
"A... never mind." The reporter walked down the hallway and
saw that there was a 'business center' where people could
use hotel phones and plug in their laptops and otherwise
get a little work done while they were on the road. He
went into one of the little cubbies and took out his cell
phone, opened the "Contacts" and scrolled with one finger
until he got to the defense attorney's entry.
He picked up the phone on the tabletop and looked at the
instructions for use. "Dial 9 to get out," it told him,
and so he did, thinking that it should only be that easy!
"9," he dialed.
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Then
"6-5-2"
Consulting his cell phone he went on
"9-3-1-1-0-8-8."
He waited.
The phone clicked twice.
Then it clicked once.
Then a voice said "The number you have dialed has beendisconnected."
Then the phone clicked twice.
He hung up the phone and looked around himself, suddenly
convinced that there were people following him.
He got up and told himself that was crazy.
He walked back up to the desk clerk and asked her if shewould mind dialing a number for him.
"Sir," she said.
He did not tell her that he was not a guest at this hotel.
He had not checked in yet, and would not check in.
"I'm a guest. I think my cell phone," he held it up "Isn't
working. Can I get you to dial a number for me to see."
She stared at him for a moment, wondering what kind of
trick this was. He stifled the urge to tell her that it
was not any kind of trick, because as soon as you tell
someone something you're doing is not a trick, they think
it's a trick.
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"I should get my manager," she said, and added that he
should wait there.
He did not wait there, and as she went into the hotel
offices behind the desk he turned and walked away, going
out the lobby and out to where his car was parked.
A meter maid was ticketing his car, standing next to it and
writing on a pad. He glanced around, looking for signs
that would mean he had parked it illegally, and could not
see any. As he did so, the meter maid looked up at him and
beckoned to him to come over there.
How did she know it was his car!
And so he turned and ran.
........THE..............................LOCAL.............
.........................................POLICEMAN.........
...........................................................
..................
"So he's wanted for what, now," asked the local policeman.
The courier shifted from one foot to the other, staring.
"I can't tell you," he said.
"But you need us to go pick him up."
"We need you to find him, and if you find him, pick him up
and hold him and then call me. At the number I gave you."
"Which I can't write down."
"Correct."
"Is there a warrant out."
"No. Not a warrant."
"Subpoena, then."
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"Not a subpoena."
"What's the authority for picking this guy up, then!" the
local policeman demanded.
The courier did not sigh. Instead, he looked at his hand,
studied the thumb for a second, where he had a slight itch,
and said, not for the first time in this conversation, "I
can't tell you."
"I'm having trouble understanding this."
The courier then finally opened his briefcase and took out
a letter. The local policeman was shown a copy of this
letter. When he reached for it, the courier shook hishead, pulled the letter back slightly.
"Read only."
The local policeman stared at him, then read.
The letter told the reader that the bearer of the letter
had the legal authority to require seizure of a specific
person to be named, and that any reader of the letter was
required by [ORDER] issued under authority of [REGULATION]to cooperate with the bearer of the letter, and that by
[REGULATION] issued by [AGENCY] in compliance with
[STATUTE] neither the bearer of the letter nor any person
reading the letter was permitted to reveal the existence of
the letter, the order, the name of the person to be seized,
or the fact of the seizure. It was signed by [OFFICIAL]
and had a seal on it.
The letter was then put back in the briefcase.
"Do not write down or give out my phone number," said the
courier.
The local policeman shook his head.
"Any chance I'll be told..." he began.
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"No," said the courier and walked out.
....................THE
FAST.....................................
FOOD.......................................................
.......RESTAURANT'S ASSISTANT
MANAGER..................................
There were only three people in the entire restaurant, and
the fast food restaurant's assistant manager was one of
them. The other one was the drive-thru clerk, and the
third was a man who sat near the back, by the restrooms.
There were only ten minutes until closing time, and the
fast food restaurant's assistant manager was thinking about
breaking down the shake machine, a job he hated, when a carpulled up to the drive-thru speaker and he hear the drive-
thru clerk say into her headset, in that voice the fast-
food restaurant's assistant manager found so sexy -- so
sexy that he had to remind himself she was only
seventeen!-- "Thanks for stopping at [FAST FOOD RESTAURANT]
how can I help you."
He did not hear what was said back; the words spoken into a
speaker outside on the large menu went only to her headset.
He watched on the screen, instead, for the order so hecould begin to assemble it. He was head cook, inside
cashier, and all the other things that needed doing, this
late on a weekday evening.
A car pulled up outside the window and the drive-thru clerk
said "That's $17.50," and on the screen above the assistant
manager's head, the order appeared, burgers and fries
and damn it a shake so the machine would be gunked up more
than ever, and then as he shook his head and realized he
wouldn't be getting to bed before one a.m. that night, four
men walked into the door from outside and two of them stood
and looked at him as they flanked the door while two of
them walked over to the corner where the reporter, who was
the man sitting by the restrooms, was staring at the
entrants.
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The assistant manager watched as the men spoke to the
reporter (who he didn't, keep in mind, know was a reporter.
To the assistant manager, this was just a man sitting in
his restaurant nursing a soda while other men came in and
talked to him in urgent low voices) and although he could
not hear what they said, he gathered it was serious as the
reporter (who he didn't know, etc.) was looking pale and
the standing men grew more serious. They took a piece of
paper out of an envelope in a briefcase, and said something
about it as the reporter reached for it.
From behind him, the drive-thru clerk said "How long is it
going to take for the burg..." and he turned briefly to
look at her and saw she was looking at the reporter (who
he... again, etc. etc.) and then he turned back and the men
and the reporter were gone, the door slowly closing behindher.
When he turned back again to the drive-thru clerk, she was
holding up her cell phone camera and had snapped a picture
of something.
-------
SIDEBAR---------------------------------------------------
"The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearanceof things, but their inward significance."
-- Aristotle
"NEW YORK -- Concluding that they suffer from "significant
constitutional infirmities," a federal district court judge
in [CITY] on Thursday struck down sections of federal law
that allow [AGENCY] to warrantlessly obtain private
information under a gag order in the name of nationalsecurity.
But U.S. District Judge... temporarily put her order on
hold to allow the government to appeal her decision,
recognizing that a higher court should first be able to
"consider the weighty questions of national security and
First Amendment rights" at issue in the case. The authority
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of national security letters, government orders to
communications providers to reveal user information, was
vastly expanded in the post-9/11 [STATUTE]. The federal
government has made wide use of them in the name of the
fight against terrorism.
In May 2011, the non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation
brought a lawsuit against the national security letter
statutes on behalf of an unnamed telephone service
provider, arguing that placing the company under a gag
order violated its First Amendment rights. EFF also argued
that the 2005 renewal of the Patriot Act provided too
little judicial reiew for the secret letters.
[JUDGE]'s ruling vindicated EFF's arguments.
"Basically the court declared the national security letter
statute unconstitutional on the grounds that it improperly
gagged the recipients," said [ATTORNEY], the group's legal
director. "Nothing changes in the short term, but it's a
very strong ruling."
Because the government still has 90 days to appeal the
ruling while it is on hold, [ATTORNEY] is still not able to
reveal her client's name."
-----------------------------------------------------------------
.....THE.............................................ASSIST
ANT.................................PROSECUTOR.............
...........................................................
..................
Having received the assignment of arguing Motion 92, the
assistant prosecutor opted to focus not on the merits, as
lawyers like to say, of the motion, but on the proceduralirregularities that meant that Motion 92 should not have
seen the light of day, let alone been typed up and printed
out and carried over to the courtroom and then presented
for filing through the prosecution's office.
"It is unclear to us how the information got into the hands
of the defense," the assistant prosecutor told the
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tribunal. "While relevant to the case, in the broadest
sense of the word, it was not cleared for release to the
defense and likely would never have been."
The tribunal frowned down at his desk, working through
recollections of what had been in Motion 92.
"I'm not sure that I agree that it was only relevant in
'the broadest sense,' he ventured, and the Assistant
Prosecutor reflexively hit the red button in a box on the
prosecution's table, the one that cut the audio feed until
it was hit again.
There was no press in the press box. The military
policeman -- only one today, given that there were only two
other people in the courtroom -- already had sufficientclearance to hear this part of the argument.
The assistant prosecutor began to lay out why the matters
set forth in Motion 92 were not exactly relevant. His
argument boiled down to this:
A. "Relevant" evidence is that which tends to make
a fact of consequence i.e. a 'material fact' more or
less probable. (This is in fact the legal
definition of 'relevance' in the legal community,although probably not in the real community of real
people, where what is 'relevant' to one's life is
not necessarily the same as 'what is likely to prove
something one wants others to believe to be more, or
less, true', in that most people's lives, unlike all
trials in the American adversary system, are NOT
devoted to proving or disproving hypotheses.
B. The alleged facts set forth in Motion 92 were
not facts at all, in that they had not yet been
cleared for release by the various offices of
various securities of various portions of the
nation, to wit: The offices of national security and
the offices of defense security and the offices
related to the security of undercover, covert, or
other classified types of efforts/people, and so if
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the facts had not yet been cleared for dispersal,
could they be said to be 'facts' at all?
C. Moreover, what the alleged facts in Motion 92
were allegedly attempting to prove was that the
alleged facts upon which the prosecution was
basing only the smallest portion of the current
case, and that portion of the case wasn't even
strictly speaking necessary to an overall finding of
guilt but bear with him here, the alleged facts in
Motion 92 were allegedly designed to show that some
small portion of the prosecution's case against the
defendant had been built upon information -- facts,
if you will -- which was obtained in contravention
of the United States' constitution and The Geneva
Convention and the Hague Evidence Convention but inpoint of fact -- real fact, not Motion 92 fact:
1. The defendant was not a citizen of the
United States and nor were his interrogators,
and so the U.S. Constitution did not apply
and
2. the Geneva Conventions apply only to
declared wars and the United States was not
at war with the defendant's homeland, whichanyway was unknown as the defendant would not
provide any information as to what state he
was a citizen of, and three different states
had at one point declined to declare him a
citizen, and
3. None of those three states were signatories to the
Hague Evidence Conventions, which are simply procedural
rules anyway and not substantive rights on parties.
The tribunal wished sometimes he could take notes on these
arguments, or at least have them read back. He sat a
moment and sorted through the mental stack of arguments he
had in his mind.
"So what you're saying," he asked the assistant prosecutor
"Is that the evidence isn't relevant, at all. The arguments
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in Motion 92, I mean."
"That's exactly what I'm saying," the assistant prosecutor
said. "In part. The evidence -- I'm using that term
loosely"
"Understood," interrupted the tribunal.
"The evidence in Motion 92 is not relevant to the evidence
the prosecution has, which it seeks to attack and exclude
by attacking the method of which OUR evidence was obtained.
But OUR evidence, the evidence Motion 92 seeks to exclude,
is only marginally relevant to our case anyway, so the
methods by which the prosecution..."
(It should be noted that in many cases, the prosecution isreferred to as "The United States" or "The state" or the
name of the state or at least the unit of government, as
the plaintiff. But in these cases, cases like the one in
which Motion 92 was filed, the prosecution or plaintiff is
referred to simply as "the prosecution." The meaning of
this would be interestingly discussed in the types of
classes that discuss philosophy, and law and the
significance of nomenclature, if the fact of how the
prosecution is referred to were known, but the people who
were allowed to know about the way the prosecution wasidentified in cases such as this one were either
uninterested in discussing why it might matter that the
prosecution was denominated simply "the prosecution," or
they were prohibited from identifying how "the prosecution"
was identified in court.)
(It should be noted, too, that the unintended consequence
of the rule that no reporter or other person disseminating
information about these proceedings be allowed to identify
how the prosecution was identified in court meant that the
reporters who were allowed to write articles about this
inevitably ended up identifying the prosecution simply as
"the prosecution," without being able to say that this was
in fact the official term of art for referring to the
prosecution.)
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The assistant prosecutor finished:
"...by which the prosecution obtained its information is
itself irrelevant. So not only is Motion 92 itself based on
classified information that was not cleared for
dissemination and therefore cannot be considered "fact"
yet, but, in the end, because the information we obtained
via the methods Motion 92 complains about is of marginal
relevance, it does not matter how we obtained the
information that is sought to be excluded by Motion 92."
...........................THE.............................
................QUESTIONING................................
.............MAN.............................................................
"I really feel like I should get to call my lawyer."
Who is your lawyer.
"His name is... why, are you going to call him."
Have you already called him.
"No. Do I have to answer these questions."
Yes.
"Then I think you have to read me my rights."
Are you aware of [TRIBUNAL RULING].
"What? I think so. Maybe."
The United States Constitution does not apply
extraterritorially, nor to actors not employed directly by
a United States prosecuting authority.
"Why are you quoting [RULING]. Where am I."
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You were booked into the Miami-Dade County Jail.
"You said extraterritorial. Am I in Guantanamo."
Who else knew you were going to the hotel.
"I don't think I have to answer these questions."
Fine.
"Where are you... Hello, where did you go."
...................THE.....................................
................NEW.........................DEFENSE........
......................ATTORNEY.............................
..................
"I don't want to talk to you," said the defendant, staring
at the ceiling after having briefly looked at the man in
the suit standing there.
"OK, I understand, you don't have to but I'm here to help
you," the new defense attorney said.
"I'm not interested," the defendant said.
"Honestly, like I said, I'm on your side. I'm your new
lawyer."
"I did not ask for a new lawyer. Or a lawyer. But not a
new one, either."
"Sure, but your old one was removed from the case."
"Why?"
"Classified."
"So you, my attorney, know something about my former
attorney, that you cannot tell me? How can there be secrets
between a lawyer and a client?"
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"Honestly, all I know is it's classified. No secrets
between us. I just don't know why she was removed. But I
got the call two days ago and now I'm here, and I'm
representing you. So I'd like to talk to you."
"Not interested."
"That's not very helpful, and these are serious...,"
The defendant interrupted, saying something in a language
the new defense attorney did not understand.
"...I didn't," the new defense attorney stuttered. "I
don't... speak that."
*Language language language* came from the defendant, abrief downpour of musical syllables interspersed with harsh
interjections.
"This isn't... I can't," the new defense attorney sighed.
"This isn't helpful to me."
*Language language* came back at him, and he almost as felt
as though the man had parroted back that line, in his own
tongue.
He stood there a moment, then reached into his briefcase,
and pulled out some papers. He held them up and began to
say to the defendant that these were important matters,
that he might be executed or deported. He said: "Listen,"
but a voice interrupted him.
"You're new here," the voice, which belonged to the
prosecutor, said, and the new defense attorney looked at
the prosecutor, who had been standing next to him the
entire time, "So I don't want you to get in trouble. That
motion that you're holding" [which was not Motion 92, it
should be noted] "is classified eyes only. He can't see
the motion."
The new defense attorney looked at the prosecutor, who
nodded. The defendant suddenly opened his eyes and looked
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up at them.
*Language language* he said, and the prosecutor grabbed the
papers out of the new defense attorney's hand, folded them
hastily and tucked them into his own jacket.
"Just helping you out," he said. "I'll give them back when
we're done here."
"So I can't show him the motion," the new defense attorney
said.
The prosecutor shook his head.
"I can discuss it with him, though," the new defense
attorney said.
The prosecutor nodded. "But you can't quote it directly,"
he said. "Not even excerpts."
The new defense attorney said "What if I accidentally use a
word in the motion without meaning to quote it?" He smiled
a bit.
The prosecutor did not smile back.
"Don't," he said.
--------------------------
SIDEBAR--------------------------------
A U.S. federal judge ruled Monday that she lacks the
authority to halt the force-feeding of prisoners on hunger
strike at Guantanamo Bay, while pointedly noting that the
practice appears to violate international law and that
[PRESIDENT] can resolve the issue.
District [JUDGE] said previous rulings already established
that the court lacks jurisdiction to stop the force-feeding
of prisoners during the ongoing protest, rejecting a motion
for a preliminary injunction sought by [DEFENDANT] held at
the U.S. base in Cuba.
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[JUDGE] faulted the militarys response to the hunger
strike, noting a consensus of opinion that the use of a
nasogastric tube to feed the men against their will is a
violation of medical ethics as well as international
prohibitions against inhumane treatment.
It is perfectly clear from the statements of detainees, as
well as the statements from the organizations just cited,
that force-feeding is a painful, humiliating and degrading
process, she wrote.
[JUDGE] wrote there is an individual who has does have the
authority to address the issue, and then quoted a recent
speech from [PRESIDENT] in which he criticized the force-
feeding of the prisoners at Guantanamo as he said he would
renew his efforts to close the prison.
...........................THE.............................
.......................QUESTIONING ........................
............
MAN........................................................
......
"I'm hungry," the reporter said.
That's good.
"No, it's not. I have the right to be fed. It's been, like
10 hours since you last fed me."
22
"What, 22, how long have..."
You have three cell phones.
"That's not right."
You have more.
"No. I... look, this is all terribly effective, but do we
have to sit in the half-dark like this. I can barely focus
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my eyes. I am pretty sure there are about four books full
of [STATUTES] that prohibit something like this."
ALL of your emails have been sifted.
"I want a lawyer."
No. In those emails you mention, forty-three times, the
bombings in Boston.
"I would like to speak to a lawyer."
No. Two of the mentions appear to predate or be sent at
the same time as the bombings occurred but before
widespread dissemination of the news there had been a
bombing.
"I'm not talking until I...that's not correct. Also, it was
INSTANTLY known that there had been a bombing."
In later emails you referred to inside sources as having
had knowledge of where the suspects might be located.
"What is it, exactly, you are saying..."
Do you know what this means.
"What is this?"
Do not pick it up.
"I can't hardly read it..."
In this motion there are references to a transmission, by
facsimile, to a classified location. The transmission
contained classified information. The fact that it had
been sent by fax, was, also, classified information. The
facts that the information existed, had been written down,
had been transmitted, had been transmitted by facsimile,
had been read by the recipient of the facsimile
transmission, and that the transmission had itself then
been destroyed, all these facts were every bit as
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The other reporter shrugged. "Probably means it's not
news. Look, I gotta go."
She stared at the fast-food drive-thru clerk, until the
girl got the message and stood up.
"Maybe try one of those websites," the other reporter said,
"Like [OTHER WEBSITE]." The other reporter was packing up
her tablet computer. "Or something," she said.
The fast-food drive-through clerk left a minute later, and
had her cell phone stolen later that night. She told the
local policeman who took her report that she had locked her
car, and had left her cell phone in it, charging.
"I don't have a charger in my apartment," she told him. "Itbroke."
"Was there anyone who would want your cell phone, in
particular?" the local policeman asked.
"Well..." the fast-food drive through clerk hesitated and
then told the local policeman about the video.
The local policeman did not write down anything of what she
said. He wasn't stupid.
"You'll get a copy of the report," he said, but he never
typed up the report.
............................THE............................
........................................TRIBUNAL'S ........
............
DECISION...................................................
......
BY THE COURT, AN ORAL RULING NOT TRANSCRIBED:
The matter, Motion 92, having been argued, it is the decision
of the court that Motion 92 be denied.
No written order shall ensue. All extant copies of Motion 92
shall be destroyed.
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.......................THE.................................
.......................................PROSECUTOR..........
...........................................................
..................
"I told you," said the defense attorney, sitting next to
the new defense attorney, who now represented her and the
defendant, "that the fax was given to me. I assumed by your
office."
"And I told you that didn't happen," the prosecutor said.
"Our office didn't give you the fax. So where did you
really get it?"
The defense attorney looked at her defense attorney.
"I don't know how else I can say this."
The new defense attorney shrugged.
"Here is the deal," the prosecutor said. "If you reveal
your sources to us, you'll get only a dishonorable
discharge. Loss of rank. No retirement. But the records
will be sealed. You'll enter into a consent decree that
both sides will say simply that you left because of health
reasons."
"But I didn't do anything wrong. I was defending my
client."
"Your first loyalty was to the government. You're
military!" the prosecutor said.
"I was doing my job," the defense attorney said.
"Your job," she heard, as she closed her eyes and wondered
whether she could remain a lawyer if she took the deal,
"Was to protect America."
That was said by the new defense attorney, who took his own
job very seriously.
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He knew who he was defending, that is. He knew who he was
defending.
---------------------------
SIDEBAR-------------------------------
"It would just be an oddity that [AGENCY] let [DEFENDANT]
design a vacuum cleaner while he was held in a secret
prison...if not for two things: its reasons for allowing
the project, and the secrecy that surrounds it. Both fall
under the rubric of insanity.
By the time of the vacuum project, [DEFENDANT], the planner
of the 9/11 attacks, had already been waterboarded a
hundred and eighty-three times, and he and other prisoners
had been moved from a black site in Poland to one in
Bucharest, on their way to Guantnamo. The main, torture-
laced interrogations were over, but the government wouldnot bestir itself to actually try [DEFENDANT] and the other
alleged 9/11 conspirators for almost a decade. (He was
captured in 2003, and his military-commission trial at
Guantnamo is still in its preliminary phases.) We didnt
want them to go nuts, a former [AGENCY] official [said]."
"No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside it's
jails."
- Nelson Mandela.
....................THE....................................
..............................QUESTIONING .................
...........
..................................................MAN......
.....
The reporter was released on bond, $1,000,000, which he
only had to sign for and promise to pay if he violated any
conditions of the bond, some of which were not written
down. He was told that if further proceedings were
required he would be notified.
A letter which was read to him told him that he could speak
to a lawyer about this with prior permission only,
permission to be requested from [AGENCY], and that claims
for compensation must be filed in [COURT], under seal. He
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would be allowed to have legal counsel review, in person, a
copy of the letter spelling out his rights in these
proceedings, upon written notice, such review to be done at
[LOCATION] after security clearances were received.
He hugged his wife and asked how long he had been gone.
He changed his gmail address.
He began writing a book, about the history of the National
Hockey League and found a new job, designing websites in
Seattle.
.................EPILOGUE........
[ONE]...........................
...........................................................
...........................................................
............
In the western part of the country, there are vast groves
of long-ago planted trees that have spent their entire
lives waiting to be cut down.
One day, one of those trees is cut down. It is dragged
across the rough, vehicle-tracked ground, past its friends
and neighbors and distant acquaintances, past the truckswith other trees that it never knew, past the men cutting
down other trees.
It is taken to a place where it is ground up and pulped.
The tree doesn't mind this. It is a tree and the shape it
is in is the shape it is in. It doesn't matter to the
tree, which, insofar as it has consciousness, has it no
matter what you do to it. Each part of the tree contains a
tiny bit of the tree and so when the parts swirl apart and
swirl together and swirl apart and together again, they
retain that and join with other parts of other trees, some
of which it knew before and some of which it did not, but
it does not matter to any of them.
These parts of trees are now a paper, and this paper is
stacked, quickly and mechanically, on other sheets of
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paper, some of which are made up of this tree, too, and
some of which are not. This is a tiny forest, now, a
symmetrical geometrical forest that rests quietly, the
stack of paper its new neighborhood replacing the old one
where it grew in a row with others who were like it but
unlike it, too, all the same but different. Now they are
all the same but the same, too, and one day this paper is
taken out of its sheath, put into a stack underneath a
machine that sometimes buzzes and hums and grabs paper from
the top of the stack to pull it away to a fate that can
only be imagined by pieces of tree from the western part of
the country.
Sometimes a tree becomes something huge -- a [DECLARATION],
maybe, of how [COUNTRY] is different from [EVERY OTHER
COUNTRY], a piece of tree carrying upon it [TRUTHS] which,though [SELF-EVIDENT] still needed to be explained in
writing, and having been so, will thereafter be enshrined
in [MUSEUM], carrying their [TRUTHS] which are [SELF-
EVIDENT] but need to be written down, maybe, as a reminder.
Sometimes, a tree becomes that, or it becomes a [WRIT OF
HABEAS CORPUS], or an [OPINION], a tree of action! A tree
of might! A tree whose humble existence soaking up the sun
has led it to this juncture, where it may bear words that
free a man, a woman, a nation, from bonds that held it.
This tree, then, this paper, waited patiently for its turn,
and one day, it was grabbed by the machine!
It was slid through!
It was printed upon!
WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT?
The paper was picked up by a receiving tray that was
closely watched by a dedicated secretary with second-level
clearance, who began to send it on its way.
..........................................EPILOGUE.........
...........................................................
.........................TWO...............................
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..................
The title of this story is a near-direct quote from the
June 19 article on "The Constitution Project," a website
devoted to covering the military tribunal trials of
Guantanamo Bay prisoners.
The Brandon Mayfield story is true. The quote is from the
Wikipedia page about him.
The national security letter ruling story appearing just
after the Aristotle quote was the beginning of a Matt
Sledge article that appeared on Huffington Post.
The two paragraphs before the Nelson Mandela quote are from
an Amy Davidson article which appeared on The New Yorker'swebsite on July 11, 2013.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7vV56dSyf7A/UeWBVzmCanI/AAAAAAAA7KA/I91qQFW4ldY/s1600/0705131655c.jpg -
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