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When I first walked into the military court at Guantánamo Bay in September, I was the first civilian artist in almost three years that the Pentagon had approved to sketch at the court on the base, and only the fifth ever.

I was there to make drawings for an article I worked on with Carol Rosenberg, The Times’s Guantánamo reporter, about the people involved in the Sept. 11 trials: lawyers, defendants and others. Specifically, Ms. Rosenberg would write about — and I would draw — what they chose to wear in court, in all its significance. No photography was allowed.

I had put all my Pentagon-approved art supplies in Ziploc bags to make it through two security checks and into The Gallery. That’s the viewing room where members of the news media and N.G.O.s, as well as law students and family members of people killed on Sept. 11, watch the trial, happening in the courtroom on the other side of triple-pane, soundproof glass.