Criticizing the “ongoing abuses” and “virtual lawlessness” at Guantanamo Bay, Attorney Jeffrey Coleman said Monday full disclosure of the facility is necessary to ensure the abuses never happen again.
Coleman, a partner at Jenner & Block in Chicago and a UW graduate, spoke to a crowd of students and professors at the University of Wisconsin Law School about his experience representing Guantanamo detainees.
Primarily a civil litigator, Coleman said he did not get involved for political reasons.
“I got involved for one reason and only one reason: There were men there who need lawyers,” Coleman said.
According to Coleman, Guantanamo is very different from American prisons.
“Guantanamo is not a jail,” Coleman said. “A jail is where you hold people pending charges and before a trial. At its highest number, only 20 men were charged.”
Coleman added that only two inmates at Guantanamo have actually been convicted, and both are now released.
Coleman attributed the difficulty in representing clients to Guantanamo’s extraordinary isolation, saying everything a client says to him is classified.
In addition, Coleman must travel to a secret facility in Washington D.C. to read classified files. He has been to the facility over 15 times, he noted, and none of what he read actually should be classified.
Noting there have been more than 200 wrongly convicted inmates in the United States, Coleman said there are “much more than 200 innocent men at Guantanamo. It’s more like six or seven hundred men who . . . are innocent men.”
Keith Findley, co-director of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, agreed.
“This is a very important story that Americans need to hear,” Findley said. “The message we’ve sent to the world has been read loud and clear. Despots around the world have been citing Guantanamo for what they can do.”
Former Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler was in attendance and stated his appreciation of Coleman speaking.
Butler said he is interested in “seeing what happens to the judicial system in the future to deal with situations like this.”
