[NYTr] Naming Names at Gitmo Gulag

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The New York Times Sunday Magazine - October 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/magazine/21Diaz-t.html

Naming Names at Gitmo

By TIM GOLDEN

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.

Diaz’s indignation at the government’s policies had been building since
he arrived at Guantánamo. He did not doubt that there were dangerous
men there. But he had come to believe that the Pentagon was
misrepresenting how the detainees were treated and the threat some of
them posed. As a lawyer, he found the recalcitrance of the White House
indefensible. The Supreme Court had spoken. Why couldn’t the
administration go before a judge and show why these men should be held
indefinitely and without charge? “I feel like I’m on the wrong side,”
he confided to a couple of the lawyers who were representing Guantánamo
prisoners.

Now, Diaz knew he was crossing a line. For nearly two weeks after
printing the list, he kept it locked inside the safe in his office. On
another late night, he carefully trimmed the pages down to the size of
large index cards. Then, on Jan. 14, the last night of his tour, he
went back to the office one more time. While his colleagues were
getting ready for his farewell dinner, he slipped the stack of paper
inside a Valentine’s Day card he had bought at the base exchange. It
was an odd touch. The card showed a cartoon puppy with long ears and
bubble eyes and the greeting, “Hope Valentine’s Day is just your
style.” Diaz would later say that he chose it because it was big enough
to hold the list. He also hoped the lipstick-red envelope might pass
unscrutinized through the Guantánamo post office.

The flaws in Diaz’s plan became apparent soon after the red envelope
reached the New York offices of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a
left-wing legal-advocacy group that counted itself among the most
zealous opponents of the administration’s Guantanamo policy. Diaz had
addressed the card to Barbara Olshansky, a lawyer at the center whom he
had never met. Weeks earlier, she had written to the Pentagon official
overseeing detention policy, Navy Secretary Gordon R. England, asking
for the names of the detainees so attorneys could offer to represent
them. Diaz, who had been copied on the draft response, knew that the
administration never considered granting the request.

Olshansky, a 43-year-old woman with a sharp legal mind and unruly black
hair, opened the valentine and suspected an elaborate joke. “I have a
lot of very wise-ass friends,” she would say later. “Why would I
believe that someone would send me something with the return address
Guantánamo?” There was no official stamp on the paper, nothing marking
it as secret. Olshansky thought the whole thing was weird, but in a way
that was unnerving rather than funny.

The center was then suing the government on a range of sensitive
issues: the U.S.A. Patriot Act, immigrants’ rights, Guantanamo. As news
of the card spread, some older lawyers at the center had no trouble
imagining a government trap. A few of the younger ones were even more
suspicious. They began writing notes to one another when they needed to
discuss the valentine, just in case the office was bugged. “Everyone
was asking, ‘Who could have done this?’ ” Olshansky recalled.

It hardly occurred to the lawyers that someone inside the
detention-camp headquarters might be trying to help them, Olshansky
told me not long ago. For all the public debate about Guantánamo, there
was little sign that members of the military were defying their
superiors. Uniformed lawyers who had been assigned to defend some of
the prisoners before military commissions had begun criticizing the
rules for those tribunals, but that dissent was explicitly tolerated by
the Pentagon. Some Muslim servicemen at Guantanamo, including an Army
chaplain, Capt. James Yee, had been investigated on suspicion of
disloyal conduct. But that episode and the others seemed to suggest
more about the high-security atmosphere of the camp than it did about
any internal opposition to how the prisoners were treated. The
valentine was different: no one had taken the law into his own hands
quite like this.

Olshansky agonized for weeks over what to do. The center’s president,
Michael Ratner, initially suggested giving the papers to the press. But
after some consultation with other lawyers, Olshansky called the
chambers of the federal district judge who was hearing her Guantanamo
suit. Olshansky told the judge’s clerk she had received some
information that might be relevant to the case. Could she send it over
for safekeeping? She said she never expected the court’s response:
Olshansky was instructed to turn the material over to the Justice
Department instead.

On March 15, 2005, a federal agent in a black overcoat flew to New York
from Washington. He took a cab to the center’s offices in downtown
Manhattan and kept it waiting while he went to retrieve the card and
its contents. Once the F.B.I. began to investigate, it had little
difficulty narrowing the list of possible suspects. Diaz had printed
the document from his own computer, bought the valentine at the base
exchange and left his fingerprints on the list. This past May, Matthew
Diaz became the only United States serviceman to be convicted and
imprisoned for an act of insubordination directed at the Bush
administration’s detention policies.

Diaz volunteered to go to Guantánamo in early 2004, after a year and a
half as the deputy legal officer at Naval Station Great Lakes, a
training base north of Chicago. He hadn’t been enthusiastic about the
Great Lakes assignment, but in his steady, low-key way he did very well
there. His superior, Cmdr. Peter J. Straub, recommended Diaz for early
promotion, describing him as “the consummate naval officer” and “a
stellar leader of unquestionable integrity.” Six good months at
Guantánamo would certainly help his chances of making commander, Straub
told him.

With other legal officers being shipped off to Afghanistan and Iraq,
Cuba sounded pretty good to Diaz: challenging, not dangerous and
reasonably close to Jacksonville, Fla., where his 12-year-old daughter
lived with his ex-wife. He did not question the military’s need to
detain some suspected terrorists, he told me later. At the Army’s legal
academy in Charlottesville, Va., where he earned a master’s degree in
2002, he had not been among those outraged by the Bush administration’s
decision to set aside the Geneva Conventions in the fight against
terrorism. “My takeaway from all of that,” he told me in one of a
number of conversations I had with him before and during his
confinement at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., “was that there was
still an order from the Defense Department that they be treated
humanely.”

But as Diaz prepared to deploy in the spring of 2004, questions about
how the law applied at Guantánamo were coming to the fore. Diaz had
known a couple of the military defense lawyers who were criticizing the
rules for the tribunals there; he admired their audacity in speaking
out. He was also struck by one of the briefs filed in Rasul v. Bush,
the federal lawsuit that asserted the right of the Guantánamo prisoners
to contest their detention in the court. Two authors of the brief were
retired leaders of the Navy legal corps in which Diaz served. “To be
sure,” they wrote, “this is a perilous time, as the president has
stated. But that does not justify indefinite confinement without any
type of hearing or judicial review.”

The Supreme Court decided the Rasul case on June 28, 2004, a week
before Diaz arrived on Guantánamo. On his first full day on the base,
he went along to watch guards notify the detainees about the new system
of parole-type review boards that the military was hurriedly setting up
in response to the ruling. Diaz was skeptical of the plan. “It just
didn’t seem right that we were creating this new process that no one
really ever heard of instead of finding a way to let them get into
district court,” he said later.

Diaz had seen his share of prisons, both military and civilian. But he
had never seen anything like the wire-mesh cages at Guantánamo. The
prisoners looked more sad than fearsome, Diaz said. In Camp 4, where
more-compliant detainees lived in barrackslike quarters, Diaz came upon
an older prisoner shuffling along with a walker. “This is what I’d been
told were the worst of the worst?” he recalled thinking. One detainee
stuck out his hand as Diaz walked up. He took it without thinking, and
the guards shot each other looks. “I thought, O.K., I shouldn’t do
that.”

As the deputy staff judge advocate for Joint Task Force Guantánamo,
Diaz had a ground-level view of the legal dramas that were unfolding in
the camp. He delivered lawyers’ mail to the detainees. He dealt with
the prosecutors and defense attorneys preparing for the military
commission trials. With that spring’s Abu Ghraib scandal still fresh,
Diaz was assigned to begin compiling a spreadsheet for internal use on
the abuse allegations registered at Guantánamo. He was uneasy, he said,
but hoped that he could make a positive impact. “I figured I could do
my part to make sure things were done right,” he told me. “I felt that
way about the military-justice system.”

Later during his first month at the detention center, Diaz’s boss was
off the island when a call came in from the regional military command
that oversees Guantánamo from Miami. The Justice Department was
proposing rules to the federal courts for the civilian lawyers who
wanted to visit detainees. Justice officials wanted the military to be
able to listen in on meetings between the prisoners and their lawyers,
and Diaz was told to work with intelligence officers to come up with an
explanation of why such monitoring was necessary.

Diaz said he went to report the assignment to the Guantánamo chief of
staff, Col. Tim Lynch. It turned out that Lynch had been over this
ground before. As Diaz sat down in his office, he recalled, Lynch
dialed his counterpart in Miami and demanded to know why Washington was
insisting on monitoring that the intelligence officers at Guantánamo
had already said was unnecessary. “ ‘Why are we doing this?’ ” Diaz
quoted Lynch as saying. “ ‘My guys have told me they don’t need it. The
boots-on-the-ground guys, they don’t need it!’ ”

Lynch was irate, Diaz said. But Diaz was more taken aback by the
substance of the exchange than by its tone. (Lynch did not respond to
my repeated e-mail messages requesting comment.) “D.O.J. wanted this,”
Diaz told me, “so we had to make up some reasons why we needed it.”
Justice Department officials sent an affidavit to be signed by the
Guantánamo commander asserting that some of the detainees had been
trained to pass “coded messages in furtherance of terrorist operations”
to comrades on the outside. Diaz and the intelligence officers were
asked to show how 12 detainees from Kuwait (whose lawyers were
challenging the visiting rules in court) might pull off such a plot.
But the officers could find only three Kuwaitis who sounded plausibly
dangerous enough, and even then, the administration’s claims were
rejected by the court. “It was a reach,” Diaz recalled. “We were just
throwing up these obstacles in the way of implementing the Rasul
decision.”

For much of his adult life, Diaz was the person in his family most
likely to do the right thing. He was the one who would come to the
rescue when someone needed help, the one who got through college and
graduate school, the one who often kept the peace. His parents divorced
bitterly when Diaz was 6, and he spent the next years careering back
and forth between them. As children, Diaz, his older sister and their
two younger brothers slept for a time in a single bed, cooking their
own meals and shopping for groceries when the food stamps arrived. “We
couldn’t count on our parents,” his sister, Shari Bravo, said, “but we
counted on each other.”

By seventh grade, Diaz had attended nine different schools. His one
respite from the turmoil came a few years later, when he joined his
father, who had moved out to California after getting a nursing degree
at Purdue University. Remarried to a younger woman with children of her
own, Robert Diaz had rented a comfortable ranch house outside Apple
Valley, a middle-class community on the edge of Southern California’s
Inland Empire. There was a swimming pool, open land and even a pair of
horses. “It was kind of like paradise,” Diaz remembered.

But the idyll was brief. As Matthew finished ninth grade at Apple
Valley High School, he answered the door to find sheriff’s deputies
outside with a search warrant. An unusual number of elderly patients
had been dying at two small hospitals where Robert Diaz had worked,
many after suffering violent seizures. The deaths exposed a host of
problems at one of the hospitals, which was subsequently closed by the
state. But after exhuming some of the dead, prosecutors in Riverside
County theorized that the patients were killed by large injections of
the commonly used heart drug lidocaine. Robert, who was new to both
hospitals, became the prime suspect.

Robert had never been in trouble with the law. No one had seen him
inject the patients with lidocaine. Nor, despite the high levels of
unmetabolised lidocaine in their bodies, was it certain they had been
murdered. But Robert Diaz was the only nurse who was on duty when all
of them died, and he sometimes carried preloaded syringes of lidocaine
in his pocket. Two vials of the drug were found in the search of his
home. (Robert said he had simply forgotten to empty his pockets before
leaving work.) Prosecutors never offered a motive for the killings, but
Diaz was arrested in November 1981 and charged with the murders of 12
patients.

“That’s when things started falling apart,” Matthew Diaz told me. At
16, he was left to fend for himself. He drifted back to Indiana, where
his mother lived, but returned to California the next summer as his
father’s trial approached. He soon dropped out of high school, found a
job washing dishes and moved into a San Bernadino motel with a
28-year-old woman who had become his girlfriend.

Diaz stood by his father, but Robert Diaz’s legal defense was a
debacle. Because he could not afford a private attorney, his case fell
to a public defender’s office that was beset with dissension and budget
problems. Robert’s attorneys persuaded him to forgo a jury trial and
take his case before a judge — a move that was almost unheard of in a
capital murder case.

With his trial looming, Robert Diaz suggested that his son consider
enlisting in the military. Almost a year later, Matthew was serving in
an air-defense artillery unit in West Germany when he saw a brief item
about his father in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. Robert
Diaz had been convicted of all 12 murders. His public defender
presented no new evidence or character witnesses in the penalty phase,
noting simply that Diaz was only 46 years old and had saved the
taxpayers money by not having a jury trial. On April 11, 1984, the
judge sentenced Robert Diaz to die in the gas chamber.

Matthew took a leave to visit his father in prison, but after he
returned to Germany, he began to distance himself from the troubles
back home. Over the years, when friends and colleagues asked, Diaz
would tell them that his father was out in San Francisco. If they
didn’t ask, he didn’t volunteer. “I wouldn’t say we’d lost touch, but I
just focused on my own stuff,” he said. “The things I was exposed to,
it just kind of hardened me.”

A few years later, his father began sending him documents from his
trial. Diaz collected the files in a big Tupperware bin. The more he
read, he told me, the more convinced he became that his father was the
innocent victim of an incompetent defense. As Robert Diaz languished on
death row at San Quentin State Prison, his son became more interested
in the law. While stationed at Fort Stewart, Ga., he took an
associate’s degree in law-enforcement studies, then a bachelor’s degree
in criminology. He decided to quit the Army become a police officer in
Georgia.

As Diaz recounted his subsequent decision to go to law school instead,
he remembered having loved the Jimmy Smits character, Victor Sifuentes,
on the television show “L.A. Law” and being impressed by an Army lawyer
who came to speak to one of his college classes. But Diaz’s wife at the
time, Melissa Reed, said his choice was deeply influenced by his
father’s fate. “He was just trying to do anything and everything he
could think of” to help his father, she said, recalling that they
considered moving to California so that Matthew could work with a
lawyer who had taken up the appeal pro bono. Robert Diaz’s experience
also shaped his son’s view of the law, Reed said. “He felt that there
were still a lot of people out there who weren’t getting fair trials,”
she said. “He’s always been for the underdog; he’s always been for
helping those people that nobody else cared about.”

To his closest law-school friend, Diaz also confided his hope that he
would one day be able to help win his father’s freedom. But in 1992,
the California Supreme Court rejected Robert Diaz’s appeal by a vote of
6 to 1, finding “substantial evidence” for his original conviction and
disputing that his trial defense was incompetent. His execution was
stayed while a habeas corpus petition filed by his lawyers moved slowly
through federal district court, where an evidentiary hearing is still
pending. Matthew Diaz continued trying to help, carting the tub of his
father’s legal documents with him from post to post.

As Diaz settled in at Guantánamo in the summer of 2004, the military
leadership there was trying to show a more humane face to the world.
Following the scandal at Abu Ghraib, journalists visiting the Cuba base
were invited to watch from behind one-way mirrors as interrogators
plied their prisoners with snacks and tea. “This is a wholly different
environment,” the task-force commander, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, told a
reporter that summer.

In sifting the abuse complaints that prisoners and others had
registered at Guantánamo, Diaz did not see mistreatment on the scale of
Abu Ghraib. Some prisoners said they had been beaten by guards; some
officials reported interrogations they considered abusive. But as the
file of complaints grew, Diaz said, officials continued to maintain
publicly that only a handful had been confirmed. “There was a lot of
stuff in the past that should have been disclosed but was not,” he said.

Some of the legal uncertainty surrounding the Guantánamo prisoners was
supposed to be resolved by the military commissions that began their
proceedings that summer. But what Diaz saw of the initial hearings in
late August did not reassure him. A former Army judge presiding over
one tribunal seemed to Diaz to be bewildered about how to proceed.
“Whatever issues the defense was raising, he didn’t have the answers,”
Diaz recalled. “It was embarrassing.”

Among Diaz’s other responsibilities was to help manage the civilian
lawyers who began flying down to visit prisoners. The first to arrive
was Gitanjali Gutierrez, a young lawyer for two British detainees,
Moazzam Begg and Feroz Abbasi. Gutierrez cut a swath at Guantánamo, but
not in a way that endeared her to most of the government lawyers with
whom she battled over access. A Pentagon official later described her
to the F.B.I. as “pushy and deeply suspicious,” according to a copy of
his statement obtained by The Times. Another lawyer in Diaz’s office
called her “difficult to please and very stubborn.”

But Diaz liked her. He found her smart, and he was impressed by her
commitment to her work. At least a couple of the other lawyers who saw
them together at Guantánamo got the impression that Diaz had something
of a crush on Gutierrez, a notion he dismissed as silly. But he asked
her to keep him in mind if her clients were ever charged in the
tribunals and she needed a uniformed lawyer to help in the defense. A
month later, he e-mailed her to wish her a happy 34th birthday (his own
39th was the next day). She sounded a little surprised to hear from him
but wrote back that she was returning to Guantánamo soon and would
bring him a new book about the Abu Ghraib scandal, “Chain of Command.”

As the end of his tour approached, Diaz’s frustration was growing. The
prisoner-abuse files that he and others had compiled now filled two
large binders. One statement, from a senior F.B.I. official, suggested
that the military authorities had ignored complaints from bureau agents
about harsh interrogation techniques. Another recounted a detainee’s
claim that a guard had thrown him to the ground and rubbed his face
violently in the dirt after the prisoner spat at him. Diaz found the
report credible — the file included a photograph of the prisoner’s
mangled face — and was surprised that it was not included among the
allegations that the military made public.

In the statements they would later make to F.B.I. investigators, Diaz’s
colleagues at Guantánamo generally described him as professional,
affable and laid-back. Some of them were more impressed by him than
others. But few of his fellow officers had much sense of Diaz the
iconoclast: the lawyer who disdained the continuing war in Iraq, who
quietly avoided social gatherings with more gung-ho government lawyers
and who sometimes broke away from the caste society of the military to
hang out with Jamaican and Filipino laborers who worked on the base.

Diaz was careful not to challenge the way things were done, he told me,
and discreet about his views on Guantánamo. “I pretty much kept my
thoughts to myself,” he said. “I didn’t broadcast them.” To the wider
military community, he could even sound a little gung-ho too. As his
time at Guantánamo was winding down, his colleagues suggested to the
public-affairs office that Diaz would make a good subject for a profile
in the task-force newsletter, Behind the Wire. The resulting article,
“Fifteen Minutes of Fame with Lt. Cmdr. Matt Diaz,” told of a Latino
kid who “left life on the street at 17,” worked his way up the ranks
and made good as a Navy lawyer.

“What do you like about Guantánamo?” the interviewer asked him.

“I like the mission,” he said. “For the most part, everybody is trying
to do the right thing, and I like being part of that and contributing.”

One afternoon in July, as we sat at a picnic table in the sweltering
visiting area of the Charleston brig, I asked if he really believed
what he had said. He said he did, describing soldiers and officers who
went out of their way to act decently toward the men who were being
held as terrorists. “They were usually just too far down the chain to
make any kind of difference,” Diaz said.

Diaz’s own inability to make a difference grated on him. Pentagon
investigators who were preparing a report on Guantánamo abuses seemed
to ignore some of the cases he helped assemble, he said. Despite the
first visits to prisoners by civilian lawyers, little information about
their treatment seemed to be getting out. On Nov. 8, 2004, a federal
district judge shut down the military commissions, ruling that they
violated international law. But the case then moved to a conservative
appeals court, where a reversal was widely expected. “I felt like
nothing was ever going to change,” Diaz told me.

On Dec. 21, the Pentagon copied him on a letter from Barbara Olshansky
at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Nearly six months after the
Supreme Court decision in Rasul, she was still asking the government
for the names and nationalities of the detainees so that lawyers could
file habeas petitions on their behalf. In a draft response, the
administration wrote that the detainees had other ways to obtain
representation.

While other military lawyers felt that the detention camp was finally
starting to open up to outsiders, Diaz was appalled by what he saw as
the government’s obstinacy. “No matter what the courts said, they would
just keep stonewalling,” he said. “I knew that if I didn’t do anything,
nobody else was going to.” Working late one night, he logged onto a
secure internal database to see what lists he could find. It was easy;
he could bring up the names 100 at a time. Diaz said later that he did
not ponder how the information might be received in New York. “I
thought they would either file a petition on behalf of those detainees
or maybe contact their families,” he told me.

As he lay in bed at night, Diaz said, he thought about the risk he
would be taking if he went ahead. Over the previous year, the military
had prosecuted or disciplined several servicemen for taking classified
materials off the island. Security had been tightened. The Guantánamo
counterintelligence officer slept in the next bedroom of the town house
Diaz shared with several midlevel officers. The career for which he had
worked so hard would be on the line. He was within striking distance of
a promotion to commander, or of retiring with an officer’s pension.

Diaz would later say he didn’t know the information he mailed off was
classified. The lists he printed out were not marked “Secret,” although
officials later acknowledged that they should have been. His lawyers
emphasized that he had access to much more sensitive, top-secret
information than anything he sent. Diaz also said he hadn’t known the
meaning of all the alphanumeric codes that followed the names. But one
of those codes identified the prisoners who had given information to
Guantánamo interrogators. Military intelligence officials described
that code — not the names — as the significant leak.

On May 18 this year, after a weeklong trial, a panel of seven naval
officers convicted Diaz on four of five counts, including one of
disclosing secret defense information that “could be used to the injury
of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation.” By then,
nearly two and a half years after Diaz had left Guantánamo, the
politics of detention policy had shifted. The detainees’ names had been
released under the Freedom of Information Act. The Supreme Court had
ruled against the administration once more, upholding the minimum
standards of the Geneva Conventions and derailing the military
commissions. The president declared that he would like to close
Guantánamo as soon as possible.

Diaz did not testify during the trial. But in a statement to the jurors
before he was sentenced, he sounded overcome by remorse. “I didn’t want
to make waves and jeopardize my career,” he told the jurors, who could
have sent him to prison for 13 years. “I am disgraced. I am ashamed. I
let the Navy down.” After three hours of further deliberation, the
jurors issued a notably light sentence of six months’ imprisonment and
dismissal from the military.

When we spoke a couple of months later at the brig in Charleston, Diaz
was less contrite. He said he bore no resentment toward Olshansky and
the Center for Constitutional Rights for turning his valentine over to
the authorities; in fact, he was sending the group donations of $25 a
month. Looking back, he insisted that he tried to do the right thing in
the wrong way. “There was nothing else that I could really do,” he
said. “I could have gone up the chain. But nothing I said would have
ever left the island.”

Diaz is reviewing his own trial transcripts now — as he once reviewed
his father’s — and working on an appeal with the same California lawyer
who has handled his father’s appeals. Shortly before his scheduled
release from the Charleston brig this month, he was stripped of his
license to practice military law. He said he is unsure how he will
support his family now but that he is thinking of trying to find work
in legal aid, even if he is disbarred as a civilian lawyer too.

In November 2006, Diaz told me, he flew out to San Francisco alone and
drove up to San Quentin. It was the first time he told his father about
the charges he faced and the risk that he could be sent to prison
himself. His father was pained by what had happened, Diaz said, but
also proud that his son had tried to do what he thought was right.

“He understood,” Diaz said.

[Tim Golden, an investigative reporter for The Times, has been writing
about terrorism and detention issues since 2004.]

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company