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  • Justice at Guantánamo:Absent Presentee
  • Claris Harbon (bio)
Kristine A. Huskey , Justice at Guantánamo: One Woman's Odyssey and Her Crusade for Human Rights (Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2009), ISBN 9781599214689, 285 pages.

I. Prologue

When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.

~ Arundhati Roy1

In her book Justice at Guantánamo: One Woman's Odyssey and Her Crusade for Human Rights,2 Kristine Huskey3 describes her journey as a lawyer in general, and as a human rights advocate in particular. The book, written like a journey-memoir, takes the reader into Kristine Huskey's major personal-professional constitutive life events. Like a traveler, she stops at certain places and memories, reflecting on their importance and role in shaping and reshaping her life. These events, from life in Angola, to living in New York City and working as a waitress and model, to traveling the world, to going to law school, and to working as an associate in a private law firm, finally led her to become one of the first lawyers who dared to take a controversial and leading role in defending detainees at Guantánamo, even "when it was too controversial to represent a detainee."4

Kristine Huskey and a team of lawyers in the private law firm where she worked challenged the validity of their clients' detentions. They argued that detaining their clients as enemy combatants violated both their procedural rights, such as the constitutional right to due process and access to counseling, and substantive rights, "including guarantees against torture."5

Eventually, after "two and half years of continuous litigation,"6 confronting a strong wall of judicial refusal to recognize [End Page 627] the detainees' rights to due process, let alone fundamental human rights, the case culminated in the landmark US Supreme Court decision Rasul v. Bush.7 Reversing the decisions of lower courts, the Supreme Court held that federal courts had "the jurisdiction to hear the habeas petitions of prisoners at Guantánamo"8 and that anyone held "in the custody of the United States . . . can challenge [their] detention-regardless of where [they] are being held or who [they] are."9

The book is divided into two main parts, each comprised of several chapters. Part I, entitled "Life Then," focuses on a few major events that have had important constitutive effects on Kristine Huskey. These events led her to become a lawyer who later found herself involved in defending detainees in Guantánamo. Part II, entitled "Life Now," elaborates on the processes leading her to take the first few detainees' cases. It tells the "inside story" of representation itself, eventually leading her to embark on a new journey, going from the corporate world, to the clinical legal program at the University of Texas. [End Page 628]

In this regard, the book allows the reader an important glimpse into the world of a key actor in one of the most controversial, tragic dramas of our time. Operating like the mechanical system that pulls the theatre curtain up and down, masking the backstage from spectators, the book gives the audience the opportunity to observe what has happened backstage, the story-within-a-story, before the rise of the curtain, during, and after the show.

The book is easily read. One of the strongest themes of the book is its inclusive nature. Kristine Huskey does not fall into the trap of using complex legalistic language, excluding non-professional readers. Instead, she manages to simplify complex legal terms (e.g. habeas corpus and due process), enabling the reader to understand themes, concepts, and principles that are traditionally and exclusively monopolized by lawyers and academics.

Using language that can be understood by readers other than academics and professionals, ones who have had the privilege to acquire education and possess the power to access certain words and language, breaks the hegemonic control and monopoly they have over knowledge. This is of special importance for me, as a feminist lawyer and scholar coming from an underprivileged community, who has dedicated her life to working with the poor, the excluded, and the silenced...

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