How Law Students Shut Down the First GITMO Prison Camp

I want to recommend a wonderful book written by a dear friend and occasional collaborator, Brandt Goldstein. As the title indicates, it’s the remarkable — and true — story of how a group of students at Yale Law School and Harold Koh shut down Guantanamo Bay in the early 1990s, when it was being used to illegally detain a group of HIV+ Haitians seeking asylum in the U.S. Here’s the synopsis:

A tale as riveting as fiction, Storming the Court is the true story of idealistic law students who challenged the United States government in a battle for freedom that went all the way to the Supreme Court–and resonates more than ever today.

In 1992, three hundred innocent men, women, and children who had qualified for political asylum in the United States were forced into a squalid detention camp at the American naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They feared they might never be released.

Storming the Court takes readers inside this modern-day atrocity to tell the tale of Yvonne Pascal–a young, charismatic activist–and other Haitian refugees who had fled their violent homeland only to end up prisoners on Guantanamo. They had no lawyers, no contact with the outside world, and no hope . . . except for a band of students at Yale Law School fifteen hundred miles away.

Led by Harold Koh, a gifted but untested law professor, these remarkable twenty-somethings waged a legal war against two U.S. presidents to defend the Constitution and the principles symbolized by the Statue of Liberty. It was an education in law unlike any other. With the refugees’ lives at stake, the students threw aside classes and career plans to fight an army of government attorneys in a case so politically volatile that the White House intervened in the legal strategy.

Featuring a real-life cast that includes Kenneth Starr and other top Justice Department officials, U.S. marines, radical human rights lawyers, and Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Storming the Court follows the students from the classrooms at Yale to the prison camp at Guantanamo to the federal court in New York and Washington as they struggle to save Yvonne Pascal and her fellow refugees.

At a time when the treatment of post-9/11 Guantanamo detainees has been challenged in the courts and the public arena, this book traces the origins of the legal battle over America’s use of the naval base as a prison and illuminates the troubling ways that politics can influence legal decisions. Above all, though, Storming the Court is the David-and-Goliath story of a group of passionate law students who took on their government in the name of the greatest of American values: freedom.

The book has earned considerable critical acclaim — including being named one of the Top 10 non-fiction books of 2005 by the Kirkus Review — and is being adapted into a movie for Warner Brothers by Michael Seitzman, the screenwriter of last year’s North Country. BBC TV is also doing a major story on the book next week, so check your local listings!

The book is available here, and anyone who is interested in getting in touch with Brandt should feel free to e-mail me.