This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — Lt. Alaric A. Piette was tough enough to serve nearly seven years as a Navy SEAL. He was smart enough to go on to Georgetown University’s law school, dedicated enough to rejoin the Navy as a lawyer and principled enough to break with military tradition by asking Congress to look into the sexual harassment of a female sailor he was representing.

But none of it, he said, has been as consequential as his current job representing a man in a death penalty terrorism case that has put a spotlight on some of the most dysfunctional aspects of the military tribunal system.

After standing up to that system for two years, Lieutenant Piette was recently informed that he had been passed over for promotion, a potentially career-ending decision that his allies saw as retribution for his tenacious work defending his client.

And it may not have helped his career that the man he defends, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, is accused of directing Al Qaeda’s suicide bombing of the United States Navy destroyer Cole off Aden, Yemen, on Oct. 12, 2000. Seventeen American sailors were killed in the attack, men and women Lieutenant Piette calls shipmates.