Well into the night of Sunday, Jan. 2, 2005, lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz sat alone at his desk in the headquarters of the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, consumed with a new project.He often worked late. From the time Diaz enlisted in the Army as a 17-year-old high-school dropout, hard work had been his ticket. He had earned his college degree while serving as an artillery sergeant and then completed law school a semester early, driving a mail truck on the weekends. In 10 years as a Navy lawyer, his performance evaluations had been outstanding. As his six-month tour at Guantanamo neared its end, his stint as the deputy legal adviser there looked like more of the same.
But the task that absorbed Diaz that night in January was taking him down a different path. Sitting at a secure desktop computer, he printed out page after page of classified information, pulling each batch from the printer in case anyone wandered by. When he was done, Diaz had assembled a document 39 pages long. In tiny type, it listed names, prison serial numbers and other information for each of the 551 men who were then being held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay.
There was no question of the government’s desire to keep the information secret. Six months earlier, the Supreme Court rocked the Bush administration by upholding the Guantánamo prisoners’ right to challenge their detention in habeas corpus proceedings. But the administration fought on, taking the narrow view that while the detainees might have been granted their day in federal court, they still had no “legal rights” — and specifically no right to counsel. Pentagon officials said that they were withholding the prisoners’ names for their own safety. But keeping the names secret made it harder for volunteer lawyers to file petitions on the prisoners’ behalf and for critics to dispute official claims that virtually all the men were terrorists.
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