It was his seventh trip in the past year and a half. Two weeks before, he had received a handwritten suicide note from one of his clients, a year-old joint Bahraini-Saudi national named Jumah Al Dossari. It would be another few weeks before the successful suicides of early June, but attempts were already politically charged.
In the summer of , after the Supreme Court ruled that detainees could challenge their confinement in U. For a certain kind of attorney, it was a Freedom Rider kind of thing.
Before taking a corporate job, Colangelo-Bryan worked for two years in Kosovo, first for an aid organization and later for the United Nations, prosecuting war-crimes and terrorism suspects. Camp guards escorted the lawyer and two colleagues past a couple of fifteen-foot-high gates into a surveillance booth. Inside, on a TV, was a grainy image of one of the cells.
Detainee No. Colangelo-Bryan had read everything he could find about his new client. At first glance, Detainee No. Instead, he found a slight man, shackled to the floor, who stood about five-foot-six and had a wispy beard. The Russians had just withdrawn, and everyone wanted to see it. He acknowledged that he had gone to Bosnia in , but not to fight. Regarding his arrest in Saudi Arabia, Al Dossari said hundreds of suspects were questioned but that he was cleared and released.
Al Dossari said he went to Afghanistan in to work for a Saudi humanitarian organization but had never been to Tora Bora. He was living in Bloomington, Indiana, at the time, serving as an imam at the local mosque, and had been invited to New York. He had recently divorced and had hoped to find a new wife and settle down there.
