The events in the following quasi-fictional account are based on experiences of several different attorneys, members of the Guantanamo Bay Bar Association, as recounted at a symposium hosted by the only Boston-area law school worth a squeeze. This is a mash-up, not intended to represent any single attorney, or any single prisoner.

For more information on attorney-client relationships at Guantanamo Bay, please visit http://nulj.org/journal.html .

There are only two charter outfits that fly from Miami to Guantanamo. One bears the absurdly optimistic name of Sunshine Air. Irony lives; only, perhaps, Justice Jet might push the envelope further. Organic satire, however, is less common than inadvertent irony.

There is one motel that serves civilians visiting Guantanamo. It's spare, but there are a few grills. The Guantanamo Bay bar is small; even attorneys who have never met know each other by name, even as just a line on a brief or an email on the listserve. Everyone knew which attorney inspired the ban on IPods at Camp Echo, and which attorney was "the hot chick" from flyover country.

There were a handful of criminal lawyers representing prisoners at Guantanamo, and several death-penalty junkies, but they didn't dominate the bar. This is surprising to most people until they learn that prisoners at Guantanamo are not accused of or charged with any crime.

These attorneys were not criminal lawyers. They weren't even litigators. Their usual clients were complex unnatural persons, absurd incestuous corporate conglomerations of parents, subs, grandparents, constantly swapping small pieces of themselves, like retroviral DNA. Everyone at their usual client meetings had shoes and clean fingernails.

There's a bus and a transport and a ferry involved, after the charter plane, and before arriving at Camp Echo. One of the attorneys, walking more slowly than the others, happened to see another prisoner being transported. Someone had swept the dirt on the ground into lines, like a sidewalk. The guards guided the prisoner, shackled hand and foot, over these lines. They goaded him not to step on the cracks.

The prisoner was shackled too tightly to lift his feet. With each shuffle he broke through a line. When he broke through a line, one guard would yell "What are you breaking my sidewalk for? Who told you to break my sidewalk? Who do you think you are?" The other guards laughed.

The attorney looked at his escort. The soldier shrugged.

The client was shackled at their first, and at each subsequent meeting. He was remarkably young, younger than the youngest associates in their firm. His wife had told the attorneys that he loved soccer. His first child had been born only months after he was taken into custody.

At the first meeting, the client had barely been able to look up; he met the eyes of only the youngest attorney, a slight young woman with big eyes and long, straight, blonde hair. At the first meeting, the client still looked his age. He looked like a young man, although a young man who had been through hell. He had. He'd been injured fleeing the bombing of Afganistan, captured by warlords, and turned over to the U.S. for a bounty.

The attorneys were in the habit of bringing small things for their client. They were limited in what they could bring. Letters, any tokens from home, or communications from people they knew, were banned. Food, however, was allowed and welcomed. It was one small way to build a rapport. This client loved dates. The attorneys would bring dates, as a gift. This allowed the client the opportunity to not only eat the dates; but to share them.

It was humanizing to the client, to be able to offer the small hospitality of a date, to his attorneys, his only visitors.

On this visit, they brought him dates, along with a few other treats. When they were brought in to see their client, in the tan uniform that demonstrated that he'd been designated as a difficult, but not dangerous prisoner, they were shocked by his appearance. He'd been looking worse and worse; on this visit, though, he was a horror.

His skin was flaking off. Not flaking, actually, like dandruff, psoriasis or the burst bubbles from a heeled burn. His skin was sloughing off, like the skin that slips from the hands of the dead. His eyes were rimmed with dark purple bands and his cheeks were hollow. His hands shook when they gave him the package of dates, and when he began to open it, they saw he was missing fingernails, down to the beds.

The package open, he reached out to give the senior attorney a date, from his hand.

Attorneys are trained to spot issues. Immediately, the little ivy league hamsters got on their well-oiled wheels, and the gears started to turn. If the client was ill, did that mean they might have a better case, or a worse case? If only the constitution applied at Gitmo, there might be an eighth amendment argument...* If there was anything that could be done for him, how could they prove that he was ill? Was there any procedure to get his medical records? If there's nothing beneficial, legally, that can come from his illness, then is there anything that the law can do for him?can they get him better or any treatment? Is this an illness, or is it a sign of abuse? Does that look like a radiation burn? Could it be malnutrition? Is it a new kind of torture? Is it diet-as-torture? Why didn't anyone tell them about their client's condition? Do they have any grounds to know? Any chance of getting a doctor in to see him? Or a picture, out?

Before anything could be done for the client; before the attorneys could leave the cinderblock room and work on his case, they would have to do what they could for the man.

People sit across a table from each other. One is shackled, maybe dying, maybe on the thousandth successive worst day of his life. They can see that it hurts him to move, to smile. Hospitality can pass between them, if not comfort.

The shackled man held out the date. The associates watched the senior attorney. He took the fruit from the man's destroyed hands. He ate the date.

*This story takes place before Boumediene II.

This account was written entirely without the consent or endorsement of any Gitmo Att'y and as a law student, I'm foolhardy enough to believe that that is not a problem.