GQ has done a beautiful and moving story on the relationship between U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Eric Montalvo (Ret.), a Gitmo defense attorney, and his client, former Gitmo detainee Mohammed Jawad, who had been detained indefinitely for seven years since his capture as a child.
The story is really too detailed to ruin by excerpting too much, but since I enjoy debunking the stereotype of detainee defense lawyers as terror-sympathizing weenies, I thought I'd post the paragraph describing the exchange between Montalvo and al-Qaeda propagandist Ali al-Bahlul, who got life imprisonment after boycotting his military commissions trial:
He soon finds himself on the top step of the military commissions building, gazing down on a makeshift tent city and sweating through his cammies in the heat. He's been assigned the separate cases of two detainees, and enters a small interrogation room where the first, a Yemeni named Ali al-Bahlul, is chained and shackled to the floor. The detainee is surprisingly lithe, a handsome man with close-cropped hair who speaks impeccable English. He's one of Osama bin Laden's former media operatives, most famous for having made a two-hour video celebrating Al Qaeda's attack on the USS Cole. It's one of the jihad movement's all-time greatest hits, and al-Bahlul is also among the most doctrinaire, having been locked away in solitary for years. As they sit face-to-face, al-Bahlul asks why the Marine is trying to be so accommodating. "Don't you know I'm your enemy?" he says. Montalvo responds that, legally speaking, he feels that a First Amendment argument can be made on his behalf, but al-Bahlul interrupts, jangling his chains. "Don't you know that if that door were opened and we both were out there free, I'd kill you?" Nothing has prepared Montalvo for this kind of venom, but his reaction is visceral. He leans forward and says, "Don't you know that if that door were open and we both were free, I'd kill you first?" When it's over, Montalvo leaves the room shell-shocked, thinking, Jesus, how can I defend that?
This is an inauspicious beginning for Montalvo, who is, at this point, fulfilling his oath to defend the Constitution in more ways than one. His relationship with his next client, Mohammed, is of course very different -- Montalvo traveled to Afghanistan to rescue Mohammed from being imprisoned once more even after a federal judge had ordered his release. Montalvo had already gone above and beyond mere duty at that point, but he returns to Afghanistan yet again out of a sense of obligation toward the child the U.S. tortured at Guantanamo, and the damaged man he's become.
So this is the happily ever after, the mother-and-child reunion, the tribe killing the fatted lamb to celebrate the answer to their prayers. And this is Montalvo, the gung-ho superpatriot born on Flag Day, the man with a Marine shrine in his office, who's never voted for a Democrat in his life, having executed his military duties with thoroughness-some might dare say "honor." But he's now forever the guy who defended a terrorist. People lambast him on the Internet. He's lost two years from his wife and kids. The military-his beloved military-has threatened him with the removal of his security clearance and a court martial, though it never acts on those threats. Even after he's left the military, after he's finally retired and gone to work for a private firm, he's marked. He leaves after six months, when the firm begins to lose business based on his "past affiliations." And the grief he's caused his own parents: How can he not question the cost? "This has been a monster," he acknowledges. "I wish I weren't at the head of the spear."
He is 41 years old, and when he thinks about the boy it all feels terribly personal, triggering some bristling righteousness that he can't contain. "Look, we took a boy, and we put him in a cage for seven years and tortured him," he repeats over and over again. "We broke him to the point where he trusts no one, and then we threw him back among potentially shady operators, with no support whatsoever. God forbid he pulls a trigger or causes the death of someone. It'd be on my hands now."
It's hard not to admire someone like Montalvo, who has sacrificed very personally in the defense of Western civilization against itself. As any one of the "Gitmo Nine" can tell you, that can be a very lonely fight.
