From the Prologue
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. . . .
After being picked up by bounty hunters in Afghanistan in December 2001, Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi was turned over to U.S. authorities offering rewards for al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Ghizzawi has now spent more than six years at Guantanamo Bay despite negligible evidence against him and an initial military tribunal ruling that found him a non-enemy combatant. The Way of the World shows how the legal structure overseeing Guantanamo failed Ghizzawi and how his case helped bring about arguably the most important Supreme Court trial of the decade.
