Book reveals secret Iraq mission and more

The next morning, a sunny, cloudless Sunday, Candace Gorman’s low heels crunch across the sandy paths of Guantánamo Bay. She tries to make conversation with the guard escorting her; he’ll have none of it. He’s a young soldier, tall and blond, and he seems angry at her. He leads her silently to a small second-floor room in the complex and locks her inside. The man sitting at a table across the room, his leg chained to the floor, looks quizzically at her. “How do I know you are who they say you are?” he says in serviceable, accented English. “Maybe you’re someone here to trick me.” Candace fumbles through her purse and hands him a business card. He shrugs. “Anyone could have printed one of these.” All attorneys registered in Illinois have to get a new bar membership card each year, and Candace, a pack rat, has kept them all. She digs through her briefcase for her official ID. She finds it after a minute, and last year’s, too. And the one from the year before. Five minutes later, twenty-six laminated cards are lying on the table. She’s had the briefcase for a quarter century.

“Welcome, Mrs. Gorman, and thank you for coming here. I have imagined it.”

“Thank you, Mr. al-Ghizzawi, I am officially your lawyer.”

With that exchange of consent, Candace Gorman, a fiftyish civil rights lawyer from Chicago, mom of three teenagers, steps to the edge of a border, a low, long table separating her from a man the U.S. government calls among the “worst of the worst.”

They settle into this odd, longish room, used for both interrogations and attorney visits, with its small table, two chairs, and cell in the corner — an eight-foot-square cage with a cot, a toilet, and a door, now open. Candace pulls out her file, which contains two notes her client has sent her about his declining health. “How are you feeling? That’s the first thing.” Ghizzawi sighs, and begins to list his ailments and their history. His health began to decline in 2004, and he’s been in increasing pain ever since. He’s been vomiting constantly; his stomach is raw. He’s lost about forty pounds. There is pain in his left side, in his back and his right leg — the one chained to the floor beneath his chair. Candace watches him carefully as he speaks. He’s about five feet ten — but he can’t weigh more than 120 pounds. He’s pale, yellowish, and weak. She doesn’t want to ask him too many questions to start, thinking about how many have already been thrown at him in interrogations. So she talks about herself and mentions that she works on cases involving civil rights. The term seems unfamiliar to him.

“In the U.S., we have rights that people have to be treated the same regardless of their religion, their race, or whether they are a man or a woman, and these rights are defended by laws. If a company or the government breaks those laws in regard to someone, I represent them. I file lawsuits in the federal court.”

He nods, tentatively.

“And I think your rights are being denied, because you have the right to at least know why you’re being held.” But before that sentence, about rights denied, is halfway spoken, Candace’s mind seems to slip backward, locking onto something she’d buried during the months of principled debate and legal struggle just to get here: this man might actually be a terrorist. Her victims of race, age, or sex discrimination were just working people. Mr. al-Ghizzawi could be Taliban, or even al Qaeda. She pushes the thought from her mind. Beside the point. This is about due process, about letting the law do its work.

First, she needs to get his story straight, and she does: How he was a baker in Afghanistan who moved with his family, as the bombs fell, to a new town. As a Libyan and a stranger, he was summarily accused of being a terrorist and handed over to U.S. officials in early 2002 in return for a sizable bounty. Candace fills one legal pad after another. Ghizzawi becomes more engaged, hour by hour, wanting to know everything about Candace and her family. She says her father, nearly ninety years old, has recently become ill, and they talk about that. “You’re lucky to have a father who has lived such a long, full life,” he says. She smiles — yes, that’s true — and then tries to keep that slippery thought (He could be a terrorist) in her grasp.

“One morning,” he tells her on the second day they’re together, “I saw a tiny flower, a rose, growing in the sand just beyond the bars of my cell. I thought, I am like that rose. Neither of us belongs here.”

Candace feels her eyes welling up. Shake it off. “So what are you reading?” she says, changing subjects. There’s a book lying open on his cot. He complained earlier about not being able to get the reading materials he wants, especially scientific or medical books to assess and perhaps diagnose his medical condition. He tells her it’s Moby-Dick, an abridged version in both Arabic and English.

She’s delighted — tells him, “It’s one of the most famous books in the English language” — and they talk about the plot and characters.

“I know it is a very good book, very famous,” he says. “But I don’t understand, why does Ahab want to kill this whale so very much? It was just a leg. He only lost a leg. It’s not like he lost his arms or his family was killed. He is still able to be a captain. Why so much vengeance to get the whale?”

“Well, he’s obsessed.”

Ghizzawi shrugs. “This guy just doesn’t give up. I don’t understand.”

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