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When Lt. Cmdr. Mattew Diaz, who was court-martialed in May this year, leaked the names of prisoners being held at the detention center at Guatanamo Bay, Cuba ("Gitmo"), he sent the list to Barbara Olshanksy, secreted inside a Valentine's Day card. Olshansky is now the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Stanford Law School, where she is teaching Guantanamo Law & the War on Terror, and planning an international human rights clinic. Tim Golden reports:
Well into the night of Sunday, Jan. 2, 2005, lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz sat alone at his desk in the headquarters of the American detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, consumed with a new project.
...But the task that absorbed Diaz that night in January was taking him down a different path. Sitting at a secure desktop computer, he printed out page after page of classified information, pulling each batch from the printer in case anyone wandered by. When he was done, Diaz had assembled a document 39 pages long. In tiny type, it listed names, prison serial numbers and other information for each of the 551 men who were then being held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay.
...Olshansky, a 43-year-old woman with a sharp legal mind and unruly black hair, opened the valentine and suspected an elaborate joke. ''I have a lot of very wise-ass friends,'' she would say later. ''Why would I believe that someone would send me something with the return address Guantanamo?'' There was no official stamp on the paper, nothing marking it as secret. Olshansky thought the whole thing was weird, but in a way that was unnerving rather than funny.
The center was then suing the government on a range of sensitive issues: the U.S.A. Patriot Act, immigrants' rights, Guantanamo. As news of the card spread, some older lawyers at the center had no trouble imagining a government trap. A few of the younger ones were even more suspicious. They began writing notes to one another when they needed to discuss the valentine, just in case the office was bugged. ''Everyone was asking, 'Who could have done this?' '' Olshansky recalled.