From Act I, Chapter 4
On an oddly balmy morning in December, Candace Gorman arrives at the "secret facility," a nondescript office building in Washington.
She waits in the foyer to pass through three separate security checks. This is her first visit to the bowels of the government's huge secret bureaucracy. After she returned from Switzerland, she immediately petitioned the court to see the new classified evidence that prompted the second military panel to reverse the previous panel's decision on Mr. al-Ghizzawi.
She received the green light yesterday and didn't want to wait a minute. She caught a flight to Dulles this morning.
After a half hour of questions and completing forms, she enters a large nondescript room about the size of a small cafeteria, with tables scattered about. A military officer soon enters and places a file in front of her stamped classified. She looks at the word. It carries a kind of strange gravity. The designation "classified" stems, she knows, from a set of very specific laws regulating the handling of documents deemed pertinent to the national security of the United States. The statutes don't consider intent, as most laws do. They deal, oddly, with transferal and movement--lifting and carrying--as though the documents might be radioactive. It's illegal, for instance, to remove documents from a special viewing room, illegal even to remove from the viewing room any notes you've taken on a classified document, and on and on. If, perchance, a legal secretary were to become the dictator of a country--a paranoid dictator with absolute powers--these would be the kind of laws she'd write.
Candace opens the file and starts flipping. Nothing here is blacked out, unlike the redacted version she read in Switzerland. There are attached items in the back. That's where the new evidence is. She begins flipping from the front--from a report on the January hearing that recertified Ghizzawi as an unlawful enemy combatant--to the back. She reads the new evidence and thinks, this can't be right. . . .
Candace Gorman is a civil rights lawyer from Chicago, who began representing Guantanamo Bay detainees in 2005. The Way of the World tells the story of her struggle to see justice done for one of her clients, Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi.
