Legal News

Covington Partner Demonstrates Treatment of Detainees

By Dan Slater

David Remes, a Covington & Burling partner, lowered his pants on Monday at a conference in Yemen to demonstrate the treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah

In a recent interview with the Yemen Observer, David Remes, a Covington & Burling partner who was in Yemen working on his representation of 15 Yemeni detainees at Gitmo, told the journalist that he had “two missions” during the visit: “first to meet the families of the men that I represent in Guantanamo and second, to do what I can to promote the cause of these men.”

It was in the name of this zealous advocacy that Remes (Columbia, Harvard Law) removed his pants at a news conference on Monday. This morning, we caught up with Remes, who had just landed at JFK after a 14-hour flight from Dubai.

“I’d been to Guantanamo in mid-June,” explained Remes, “and there’s a certain amount of normalcy that has settled over the normal miserable conditions of confinement, which amount to solitary confinement without sleep and without sunlight and without anyone to talk to. So at the news conference, I said that, in addition to this torment, which has become so typical that we don’t even talk about it anymore, now the torment also consists of constant body searches in which the men are required to pull their shirts up to their chest, drop their pants, and then the corn-fed U.S. military sticks their thumbs under the prisoner’s underwear band and circles the prisoner’s torsos.” Remes said these searches can take place several times in the course of a day.

Remes continued: “At the press conference in Yemen — this is a society where the rule of morality is so strict — I wanted to drive home the degree of humiliation that these searches cause by illustrating a typical body search. The physical abuse they can stand. The verbal abuse they can stand. But when the military punishes Muslim men by shaving off their beard, or by forcing them to disrobe — for a Muslim man that is a thousand times more cutting than a Westerner can imagine. And that’s what I was trying to dramatize. The reaction to what I did makes me very sad. I wish people paid as much attention to the suffering and torment in Guantanamo as they paid to the way I sought to dramatize it.”

A call to a Department of Defense spokesman was not immediately returned. Of course, we’ll update the post if and when we hear back.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 16, 2008 (boomark / email).