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He is basically talking to himself. The words come out, the translator translates them into Arabic. But then they just seem to linger, reverberating off the cell walls and ceiling, unacknowledged.

The room is just as the lawyer had imagined it would be. An eight-by-ten steel-and-concrete shed, with a separate holding cell and bunk to the right. He is sitting with his translator and the JAG lawyer detailed to the case at a small metal card table. All of this is just as he had pictured in his mind. It is the man shackled to the floor right in front of him he couldn't come to terms with.

The briefing material estimates the man's age at about thirty-five. But he appears far older — the seven years he's spent locked out of sight have aged him severely. His slight black face is dull and cracked like an old road. His long black beard is streaked with gray, his fingernails yellow, his upper teeth missing. He's managed to flip his sandals off to one side and lean back in his chair. He is slouching, looking away.

The lawyer spent six months trying to get into this room. He'd written letter after letter to the prisoner. He'd come to Guantánamo twice before to see him, and on each visit he'd been turned away without explanation. But today, the day before the arraignment, the prisoner has agreed to see him. Yet he does not talk and keeps looking away.

The lawyer has an hour to make this work.

He can feel his heart beating faster and faster, and being nervous is not going to help. So he makes himself slow down as he speaks. "I'm a civilian attorney," he says. "I'm here to help defend you if you will accept me. I'm not a military interrogator." His words come out deliberately, as if he's chiseling them into stone.

The prisoner's eyes drift away. He looks down at the prayer schedule taped to the table, then up at the large clock on the wall, then back out to nothing.

Fifteen minutes pass like this.

The lawyer glances at the clock now as well. What now? he thinks. What now? In all his years with the firm, he's never had a client just ignore him like this. And if he doesn't get through to the prisoner and quick, the prisoner will be left to face the commission alone. And he will surely lose.

He takes a long look at the JAG lawyer to his right, then back at the prisoner, still leaning back in his chair. With a deep breath he starts in on his last chance to connect with this man.

"I'm married," he says. "My wife is waiting for me back in Arizona where we live. We will be celebrating our fortieth wedding anniversary later this year." His words echo off the hard walls and steel.

He continues, "I have four grown children. They don't know what I'm doing today, in this little room, on this little island, and I don't know if they will fully understand why I'm doing it. But I miss them," he says. "I want to see them."

The prisoner glances over, then back at the clock.

It's absurd, the whole scene, the white-shoe corporate attorney sitting in a dank shed trying to explain esoteric legal concepts to an illiterate peasant. None of this makes any sense. He remembers the wedding not long ago in Phoenix, standing with his wife when a friend pulled him aside.

"The FBI called me," his friend said. "They were asking all sorts of questions about you. Is everything okay, Howard? Are you all right?"

The lawyer had laughed. The same thing had happened with his neighbors a few weeks before. The FBI had asked everyone in the neighborhood for tips or information on the lawyer's habits, and the neighbors wondered if the lawyer was tied up with the Mafia.

"Yes, I'm fine," the lawyer said. "It's about a case I'm working on. I'm trying to represent a prisoner at Guantánamo — "

"What?" His friend cut him off. "Are you serious?"

"I know," the lawyer said, shaking his head.

He tried to explain; he told his friend what he told anyone who asked: "Everybody deserves a lawyer. Even suspected terrorists." It was the same thing he'd told his children for years when they asked him how he could defend some of his corporate clients, like large tobacco companies.

He looks at the prisoner and continues, "My father passed away from Alzheimer's disease six years ago. He grew up in Yonkers, near New York, during the Great Depression. He never went to college, but he had street smarts. And he was a fighter; he'd get beaten up by the Irish kids in the neighborhood every day." Then he moves on to his mother. He knows very little about the man before him. But he knows that he must have family. Maybe they can connect on family. The prisoner hasn't spoken to his own family in seven years.

He looks up, impassive, his demeanor unchanged by the lawyer's life story. He's been chained to the floor, and still the lawyer talks.

And the lawyer talks, and talks.

A half hour more has passed.

The lawyer, unwilling or unable to accept his obvious failure, won't stop. He always took pride in thinking of himself, like his autodidact father, as a fighting blue-collar boy. He weighed little more than 150 pounds in high school, but he wanted to be a linebacker. He knew it was stupid, his parents and coach thought it was stupid, but he kept at it and he made all-state. It was the same in college. He arrived thinking he would be a star; instead he started out on the fourth team, but he worked his way up to the first team. The same in law school. He was written off as a jock. And then in his career. He was a working-class Jew from New Jersey. He'd come from nothing, but there was no way some entitled Ivy Leaguer was going to push him around. He was confrontational, but that's the way you've got to be when you're always pushing a rock uphill.

He's now talking so fast that the translator has trouble keeping up. "My grandchildren are turning three next month... My son lives in New York... My youngest daughter is a teacher in Phoenix."

And then suddenly, he stops. It's been just over an hour.

He takes one more long look around the room, at the cell and the steel bunk and the steel toilet and the O-ring drilled into the floor attached to the man's ankles. He looks closely at the man in front of him, Noor Uthman Muhammed, prisoner 707. He is from Sudan and is accused of having been an instructor at the Khalden jihadi training camp in Afghanistan from the mid-1990s to 2000. According to his combatant-status review, he was a senior member of Al Qaeda, the "70th Taliban commander," and "was frequently left in charge of the Khalden camp because he was judged to be good with people and could handle all aspects of the camp." He was seized from what the government describes as a safe house owned by a senior Al Qaeda member in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in March 2002. He has been held here since, without a lawyer. In the morning, January 14, 2009, he will be brought before a military commission in the courthouse at Guantánamo Bay and formally charged with training Al Qaeda militants in Afghanistan. It is one of the last war-crimes commissions of the Bush era, a final attempt to advance the commission and the war-crimes process to the point where the new president cannot stop them.

My father takes one more long breath and leans forward in his chair. Across what seems like an endless gulf between them, he asks the man to think about everything he has said, and he leaves.

We're having dinner at a Japanese restaurant near my office in New York City when my father, Howard Cabot, tells me about his meeting with the prisoner. We do these dinners every few months when he passes through town on business, on his way from one hearing or another.

"I didn't know what to do," he says. "He just kept looking away, so I just kept talking." My father is wearing the same oversized blue jeans he wears whenever he travels, and the same oversized blue Brooks Brothers dress shirt and oversized sweater.

"What do you mean?" I say. "You just kept talking about the family?"

"I didn't know what else to do. So I just kept going," he says. "But Tyler, you have to remember, it's like talking to a wall."

He's sucking edamame out of the shell with one hand, digging through the bowl with the other while he replays the meeting.

He's always been able to command a table with his stories, like the one about the time he punched out the umpire in high school, or showed up so drunk at my mother's dorm room that she told him to get lost, or got thrown out of a football game for kneeing the Penn quarterback in the balls over and over again when he was already on the ground. But those stories, like this one, seem unreal, as if they don't belong to my father at all.

The father I know is careful and calibrated, always disciplined, always in control of his emotions. He wears a suit every day. He rarely drinks. He gets his hair cut every three weeks, precisely. He's a corporate defense litigator, the cleaner brought in to protect corporations like DuPont, Dial, and Merrill Lynch in court. The cases can be anything from copyright infringement to fraud to defending companies like Brown & Williamson, the makers of Kool cigarettes, in suits brought by the government. When I was growing up, he'd be gone for days at a time, and if he was trying a case, weeks. New York, Palo Alto, Chicago, Hartford.

The closest I ever got to my father's work was when I was eleven, during a case he tried in Maui for a company called United Technologies. The company was defending against a claim it designed faulty sewer pipes, all of which seemed to fail at basically the same time. Simple case, big news, and lots of angry people with no doubt who the villains were and what the outcome should be. The kind of case my father was born to defend. For months, he commuted, flights from Phoenix to Maui on Sunday night, back again on Friday. That summer we all flew out to Hawaii to be with him. I remember him going over documents and briefs late at night. I remember him swapping his Rolex for his running watch, because he didn't want to come off as too slick for the jury.

I saw him in court once. There was some city official sitting in the witness box. The courtroom was full and hot. But my father looked impervious, as if he were watching the scene from above, seeing every move before it happened.

He began by asking a seemingly innocuous question. It was probably about pipe fittings or lubricant. Then, "Do you remember how the foundation was prepared that day?"

"I'm not sure," the guy responded. He couldn't recall, and he didn't know what to say.

My father turned to the jury, then back to the man. He waited a perfect beat. And then with practiced mock disbelief, he said, "I don't understand. Were you not there? Wasn't that your job? I mean, was there someone else doing your job?"

The guy was a stammering mess. "Uh, no, uh, uh..."

That's how I think of my father as a lawyer — drilling, drilling, drilling, the poor man stunned to find that he's been emasculated.

Only once did I ask him about the clients that I came to believe were morally suspect. I was in high school and we were sitting at the kitchen table in our old house. My dad was telling my mother about his defense of an asbestos company.

"Dad, hasn't it been proved that asbestos causes cancer?" I asked. "I mean, how can you take on a case like that?" I was a punk.

My father is usually very even-keeled, calm and unbreakable, but if you catch him at a bad moment, he'll immediately shift into what my three older sisters and I recognize as "lawyer mode," like he was that day in Maui. With my impertinence, he was no longer Dad; he was Howard Cabot, indefatigable advocate for the asbestos industry.

"There isn't one iota of evidence that asbestos alone causes cancer," he shot back, the vein on his temple bulging. "All the studies show that there could be numerous factors. And now we have thousands of people claiming that their cancer had to have been caused by asbestos. They want to tear down every building in America."

He was pissed off and very irritated at me. He had made a good living, an excellent living, and built a life of such comfort for me and my sisters that I now had the luxury to sit in judgment of his chosen field. But I just couldn't understand how he could do that work. Yeah, everybody deserved a lawyer, but did it have to be my dad? There was no good way to bridge this divide. I decided that some arguments were better avoided.

It was the same with his staunch support for Israel. When he wasn't working or at one of our soccer games, my father was at a meeting for the Jewish Federation or some other Jewish community function. A few years ago, along with my mother, he was awarded a Jewish National Fund "Tree of Life Award" for lifetime dedication to Israeli causes. He gave thousands of dollars a year to these groups and helped raise hundreds of thousands more.

"The Jews cannot lose their homeland," he'd say. "We need to protect it at all costs."

"But, Dad, can't you see…"

"Look, Tyler," he'd say. "People in that part of the world just don't understand the West. They see weakness in compromise. You have to stand up to them. Never give an inch."

It was the same with the invasion of Iraq after 9/11. "You have to draw a line in the sand and you have to hold firm," he'd tell me. "We can't just let these people push us around."

I came home a few months into the war and he gave me a book, William Bennett's Why We Fight. He agreed with Bennett, he told me. He wanted me to understand where he was coming from.

Instead of engaging him, I made a crack about Bennett's compulsive gambling, stuck the book on a shelf, and never picked it up again.

That's the way my father and I argue. We make a quick dig — "He's your president," I'd always remind him when bad news came out of Iraq — then laugh it off and move on.

But it's his stark binary worldview, which he tried with varying degrees of failure to impart to his children, that makes the prospect of my father defending an Al Qaeda figure with the same vigor as he would a pillar of American capitalism almost impossible for me to understand. And so as the sushi plates are cleared and he's finishing his story, I am stunned to speechlessness.

"So I told him to think about what I said, and I left." His voice is full, and he's proud of himself, and he's studying my face for a reaction. He wants me to be proud of him as well.

I'm looking straight into his eyes, and I hear his words, but more than anything, I just want to know what this man has done with my father. This story is just like all the other ones he tells from his days in college, before he was so spit-and-polished, and it's just as unbelievable. The father I know would never take out a quarterback when he was down, and the father I know would never represent a Muslim terrorist.

Randall Damm/U.S. Navy

"Tell him I say hello," my father says to his interpreter.

He waits, not knowing if the prisoner will talk to him today.

"Hello," the man says.

My father exhales. Okay, let's get going. This arraignment's in an hour, and we have an impossible list of things to go through. Of course, now if the prisoner says something that blows up his defense, it will be my father's fault.

He has thirty minutes, maybe less, to explain the intricacies of military commissions to a man who for the last seven years has been chained in a box on an island, cannot read or write, and doesn't trust anyone.

My father pulls out the script on the hearing that was prepared by the court, with detailed highlights and annotations he made the night before. He drags his chair forward, bends his head toward the prisoner.

"The first thing that will happen is the introduction of the lawyers," he says. He's looking directly at him, focusing on the prisoner's eyes, as the translator translates.

The prisoner nods.

But who will represent this man? Just because the prisoner now recognizes that my father exists doesn't mean that he really wants anything to do with him. You can't force another man to trust you. He's got to come to that on his own. "So when you're asked by the judge," I can see my father saying, "say something like this: 'Your Honor, I am not ready to make a decision on my lawyer at this time.' "

Next, most important, comes the plea. My father spent hours the night before trying to figure out how to explain this. He read the prisoner's combatant-status review from October 2004. "I did not see bin Laden, nor did I meet him," the prisoner told the review board at the time. "As I previously told you, I have no knowledge of Al Qaeda, and I don't know anybody from there. But if you want to say that I'm Muslim and want to make believe I belong to Al Qaeda, then that is something different."

It will be the same today. The prisoner will want to deny the charges against him. And why not?

But he can't. It's one of the peculiarities of the commission system. If he pleads not guilty, if he accedes to cooperate with the system arrayed against him in any way, he'll be tacitly accepting the validity of the charges. He'll be recognizing the authority of the United States of America to continue to imprison him. And he'll forfeit the right to challenge not only the specific charges against him but the validity of the entire proceedings.

But how can I explain so he'll understand? How do I explain that refusing to enter a plea doesn't mean that he's admitting he's guilty?

This is the moment of truth for a lawyer: You, Howard Cabot, have a man's life in your hands. Are you up to it?

Early in his career, my father did a fair amount of criminal and civil-rights work. He represented conscientious objectors. He worked for tenants' rights in Camden, New Jersey. He had clients who paid him in crops. "You may remember Mom and I talking about a man named Sy Traister," he would tell me. "One of the first criminal trials I ever had. Went for five weeks. A mail-fraud case. The guy was acquitted on all charges. It was a wonderful experience, got me into upholding people's rights, but it was extremely stressful to me because I wasn't just dealing with moving money from one side of the table over to the other side. I was dealing with people's liberty and their life. And sometimes it was a very ugly environment. I guess it was primarily the weight of having someone put their life in your hands… and that I might exercise my judgment… mistakenly. So as my career progressed, I did less and less criminal work. You guys were getting older. It wasn't lucrative. The real money work was work I didn't want to do. I didn't want to do drug cases. What can I tell you?"

It was a phone call, he told me. The Center for Constitutional Rights had gotten his name from one of his partners and asked if my father would consider filing court petitions of habeas corpus on behalf of prisoners being held.

He knew the CCR's reputation for liberal activism, and he didn't want any part of that. But as the president he supported prosecuted the war on terror that he also supported, something tectonic shifted in my father. American justice is based on first principles, he said. And among these is that we treat prisoners — people in a position of powerlessness — humanely. And that they can question their imprisonment. And that we don't presume guilt. As an American, the pictures from Abu Ghraib made my father ill. As a lawyer, they made him ashamed. He told the CCR he'd do it. And that's how he got to be here in this room, with this prisoner.

I never knew my father as an idealist, as someone given to rhapsodizing about the supremacy of the law, but I also never knew him as anything but indomitable and fearless. Now the prisoner is sitting quietly, locked to the ground, waiting, and my father is unsure.

He continues, leaning in close, maybe as deliberate as he's ever been. "What did you say?" I ask. "Did he understand?"

"I can't tell you that, Tyler," he says. What passes between a lawyer and his client is a covenant, a secular sacrament, known only to them. But I can see my father saying, "At arraignment, you are asked whether you are going to enter a plea of innocent or guilty. But you don't have to enter a plea. In fact, it's important that you don't enter a plea. We need to challenge the validity of the order that created these charges. If you enter a plea, you'll waive our ability to do that."

And I can see the prisoner looking at the translator, wondering if he's heard correctly. "But I'm not guilty," the prisoner says. "Why can't I just say that?"

My father is not known for his patience. He collects his thoughts. Tries to think about how to explain this. "It's a matter of acknowledging the validity — "

No, simpler, simpler.

"Mr. Uthman," he starts again. "I know you want to plead not guilty, and you can later." His words come out slowly, as he labors to explain the concept. "But if you do it now, you'll also be saying that the commission has the right to charge you. That them holding you here and charging you is legal in the first place. I want to argue that it is not. But I can't if you plead not guilty."

I can see the prisoner leaning forward now, then back. He hears my father, but he doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know if he can trust him.

"Do you understand, Mr. Uthman?" my father asks.

"But I'm not guilty."

"Mr. Uthman, I know it's hard to understand. But it's really important, and I need you to trust me."

The man looks back at him. He looks lost.

My father starts again from the beginning.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

"I do wonder why none of you ever wanted to be lawyers," my father says. His voice is soft, his words carefully considered. He and I are taking a drive through the California desert. We both like to drive, and I thought it might be easier to talk about these things in a moving car. He's been telling me about some of the cases he is proudest of, the cases that made his life as a lawyer worth living, like the penniless salesmen and merchants he helped as a public defender before I was born, and the Vietnam vet he took on when I was in high school. The man had been forced to confess to a murder he didn't commit, and my father sued the state to free him.

But my father is at a loss as to why none of us wanted to follow his example. "And I wonder if it was because of me. And talking to you now, I guess I don't know how you guys perceive me. I mean, what did you think I was doing for all these years and all the hours I was away?"

This is hard. I'm struggling now, grasping for my thoughts. Even if it was for the good of our family, how could he spend thirty years representing some companies that made people sick? He went from defending people like himself — working-class people who started with nothing, people like my grandfather, who fought his way out of the tenements of Yonkers — to siding with morally questionable corporate behemoths.

"I always appreciated that your representing these big corporate clients paid for college and all those things," I say. "And I appreciate that everyone should have a lawyer. But I never really understood how you came to terms with doing that kind of stuff."

He stops me here.

"Let me help you." Lawyer mode.

Now his voice doesn't waver: "You view me as doing some of the profitable corporate work to facilitate some of the things we did at home — taking trips, living in a nice house. But in my world, what the profitable work allowed me to do is the very work we are talking about now — Guantánamo.

"I've always viewed my ability to take on pro bono cases as one of the rewards of doing some of the work that may not be as interesting to you. It finances these kinds of cases. And maybe that's how I lived with it. But I also knew one thing: With four children, I couldn't be a public servant the whole time. I just couldn't do it.

"I'm still wondering, Tyler. What did you think I did when I left in the morning, came home, or sometimes didn't come home for days at a time?" He is wrung out and almost yelling. "What were you thinking about it?"

"I didn't know," I tell him, my voice raised now as well. "I knew you smoked your pipe late at night and looked at documents. I knew you only tried cases every couple of years." I stop for a moment. "Remember when you asked me about going to law school? Do you remember that?"

"No. I mean, I try not to pressure you guys."

"It was about a year after I graduated, and I had been looking for a job for six months. You said, 'What are you going to do?' And I said, 'I'm not sure.' And you said, 'Why don't you be not sure while you get a law degree?' "

I remember hanging up the phone in my old Washington, D. C., apartment pissed off. When I graduated college, my father told me I was too old for him to tell me what to do. Instead, I should see him as a reference, like a dictionary or encyclopedia I could pull off the shelf if I needed advice. This advice was as unwelcome as it was bad. Becoming a lawyer was the last thing I wanted to do.

"I have so many doctor friends whose kids became doctors," he says. "And so many lawyer friends whose kids became lawyers, you know what I mean? Well, let's stop. The question is whether any of the cases we just talked about — the cases that have made me proud to do what I do — if you had known about those, would it have changed things?"

The car is silent save for the rhythm of tires on pavement. We're heading north toward Los Angeles, and even though the road is jammed, we may as well be alone.

"Talking to you now," he says quietly, "I have a feeling that I failed. I never brought home all the wonderful things you can do as a lawyer."

They don't know his name. Nobody knows his name.

He walks slowly, small stuttered steps, the shackles rubbing his ankles raw. The eyes in the courtroom stare. Military police, lawyers, officers, journalists. He looks back out at them, then he sits at the defense table. It is his first time in a courtroom in his seven years here, probably the first time in his entire life.

He sits down, and a guard proceeds to secure him. Then the military judge asks his name.

Until now, the government has known him only as detainee 707. It believes his name is Noor Uthman Muhammed, or some combination of those words. But he's also been listed in documents as Zamir Muhammed, Akrama al Sudani, Abu al Hareth, Farouq al Kamari.

"How would you like to be addressed?" the military judge asks. "What is your name?"

My father is sitting a few feet away from the prisoner at the defense table. He's staring at the prisoner, waiting for an answer.

The question is simple, but the prisoner won't speak.

"I don't understand," the prisoner says at last.

The translator turns to my father.

"Explain it again," my father says. "Tell him the judge wants to know what to call him."

The translator turns to the prisoner, retranslates the question.

"Noor," the prisoner says at last.

"Noor?" the judge responds. "Just Noor?"

"Yes," he says meekly. "Noor."

My father looks straight ahead, trying to hide his concern.

The hearing continues.

"Trial counsel, please state by whom you have been detailed and your qualifications," says the military judge.

The prisoner sits quietly. His eyes roam the room, looking at the judge and the media in the gallery, all sights he's never seen before. Then he looks down at the table, as if at the moment the sights and sounds are too much, as if he wants to go back to his cell.

"I have been detailed to this military commission by the chief defense counsel," says my father's cocounsel, sitting next to Noor in her dress blues. She has never spoken directly to the prisoner. She knows that he is very religious and doesn't want to make him uncomfortable. But she has her orders and has to be here, regardless of the prisoner's wishes.

"I am qualified under R.M.C. 503, and I have previously been sworn in accordance with R.M.C. 807," she continues, referring to the military commission rules for counsel.

"Thank you," says the military judge.

And now it's my father's turn.

"My name is Howard Cabot," he says. "I am from the law firm of Perkins Coie and am licensed to practice law in the state of Arizona."

"Noor, do you accept Mr. Cabot as your attorney?" the military judge asks.

The prisoner raises his eyes but does not say anything. He knows enough from what the lawyer told him to know that in the strange Kabuki theater of American justice, there is a wrong answer to this question.

As my father rises and pushes his chair back, the MPs behind him break their fixed expressions. They don't try to get in his way but rather sit back in astonishment at this break in protocol.

My father, in his navy suit, is next to the prisoner now. He is kneeling on the ground next to him. His eyes inches away from the prisoner's eyes, his hand resting on the prisoner's knee.

"Mr. Uthman," I can see him saying, "this wasn't supposed to happen. You shouldn't have to decide that right now. But now we need to figure out what to do."

The translator has his hand over the mic now, as if he's blocking for my father.

And there my father is, the same tough bastard he was back on the football field: Small for his position, but he'll make you pay for underestimating him. He huddles with his client, a man with no rights, keeping one eye on the judge from the most powerful country ever conceived, hoping she doesn't crush him and his client for this impertinent violation of the rules. My father gave his adult life to defend companies. It took him a long time, nearly a lifetime to get here. But he's here now, on his knee.

"It felt like an hour, but it was probably only five or ten minutes," he says now. "There was no pause. I was not worried about cadence. And he's interacting back and forth with me. I mean, there is music being made here. I kept looking at the MPs next to me — young faces, eighteen or nineteen. They were white-faced."

My father takes his hand off the prisoner's knee. He stands up and walks back to his chair.

"Your Honor, I think he has something to say to you," my father says.

"Noor, do you accept Mr. Cabot as your attorney?" the judge asks again.

Noor does not hesitate this time.

"Yes, I will accept Mr. Cabot as my attorney," he says. "And if there is a Sudanese attorney, I want him as well."

There are inflection points in the life of a man, or in the life of a country. That is, there are points beyond which things will never be the same. Once you've taken responsibility for someone's life and freedom in a challenge to the authority of your own government, torts and contracts and product liability might lose a bit of their urgency. Once a man has changed, it can be hard to reconcile his old self with the new. Once a country has changed, it can be unrecognizable to those who thought they knew it best.

Guantánamo has changed Howard Cabot. And it's changed the way I see my father. As we make our way back to Phoenix on the I-10, I am trying hard to reorient myself with him.

"Has this changed your worldview?" I ask.

"It's hard for me to say yes on this because of Israel," he says. "Because of the history there. So many disappointments, so many times. But I guess I am coming out of this experience more willing to at least find a point for dialogue than I have before. But it's not just from what happened to me at Guantánamo. It's all the reading I've done. It's the Lebanon war. The Gaza war. All these things are making me think that the foreign policy we've had hasn't been productive in terms of the American image.

"But it's like life in general for me, Tyler," my father says. "You've seen me all these years. And I don't know if you've seen any changes in me. But yes, I am a different person today in terms of my values, in terms of my patience, in terms of my tolerance than I was ten years ago. This experience is just another experience that has supported my transformation."

Before the hearing ends, before my father says goodbye to the prisoner and begins planning for his trial and looking for a Sudanese attorney to join the defense team, there is one more huddle.

It's time for Noor to enter a plea.

"Your Honor," my father says, "my client would like to postpone any plea." It's clear from the expression on Noor's face that he doesn't like this at all. He looks around the room at the MPs and the journalists and observers in the gallery, and he starts talking angrily to the translator.

My father asks the judge for a moment, and once again drops to a knee beside the prisoner.

This time the conversation doesn't go well. This time the prisoner is insistent. He cannot put off his plea, not in front of all these people. They'll think he's guilty.

There was a time when I would have known how this story was going to end. My father would have insisted, and he would have drilled, drilled, drilled until he had gotten his way.

Instead, he crouches in closer. My father is frustrated, but he listens to Noor now, closer and more patiently than he ever has before.

Finally, my father returns to the table and asks the judge if Noor might make a statement. The judge allows it. Noor rises, and his voice is defiant. "I want to say only that I am not guilty," he says, leveling his gaze at everyone in the room. "That's all."

My father looks over at him and smiles. Then he leaves the courtroom and packs for his flight home from the island he never supposed he would be on.

*****

The case of prisoner 707 has been held in abeyance, as have all Guantánamo cases, subject to a review ordered by the White House. My father's work on the case continues.

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