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MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. — He didn’t know what they look like. He didn’t know the sound of their voices. He had no reliable information on how they got into the situation they were in. The only thing Joe Margulies knew about his clients was what he’d learned through their families. And even they knew almost nothing about what happened — except the fact that the four men were captured by U.S. troops during the Afghanistan war, and that they’d been kept in detention ever since at the U.S. naval station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Even this fact the U.S. government hadn’t confirmed officially for Joe Margulies. “It’s like Alice in Wonderland,” Margulies said during an interview. “Nobody says the truth, nobody wants to be responsible.”

The lawyer was sitting in his office in a wooden Victorian-style mansion in a suburb of Minneapolis. The slim, tall man with a gray beard specialized in representing people without much hope. For more than 20 years Margulies had been defending Mexicans who were sitting in U.S. death rows. He saved a number of alleged murderers from the electric chair, he said. Whenever he found a case worth defending, even when it didn’t look at all promising and he would have to do it pro bono, he took it. Such was the case of the four men in Guantanamo.

For the U.S. government, the naval base off the southern coast of Florida was simply outside the U.S. legal system. “Detainees are not entitled to legal representation under any international or domestic law,” said a Pentagon spokesman. Hence lawyers such as Joe Margulies had no access to the inmates. From the Pentagon’s point of view they were not regular prisoners of war but unlawful combatants not entitled to due process.

“Detainees are being held as enemy combatants to prevent them from continuing hostilities against the United States or its allies, not as criminals,” said the Pentagon. Nobody was allowed to contact the inmates, except CIA and FBI interrogators.

Margulies likened the situation to the story of little Alice. “There is a scene where Alice comes to the table and they scream there is no room for anyone to sit down — and the whole table is empty. It doesn’t make sense, the world is upside down,” he said.

The goal of Joe Margulies was to change this. Compared to the other approximately 660 detainees in Guantanamo, his defendants could almost be called lucky, Margulies said. Even though they were originally from countries including Pakistan and Egypt, they were citizens of the United Kingdom and Australia. Their families contacted human rights lawyers, who then handed the cases over to Margulies. Most of the other detainees had no lawyer at all.

Total incommunicado

Even though he had been in business for almost 25 years, Joe Margulies had never experienced a case similar to this one. “I can’t talk to my clients on the phone, I can’t fly there. They are in total incommunicado detention. There is still no mechanism for speaking to them.” The Pentagon said the detainees were allowed to write letters to whomever they wanted and to receive letters through the International Committee of the Red Cross. But Margulies said his attempts to exchange letters with the detainees had been unsuccessful.

“The U.S. wants to create in these people a feeling of hopelessness and despair,” Margulies said. “They intentionally cut down their connection with the outside world, so they have no hope of rescue, of relief. So they will eventually abandon whatever resistance they have to interrogation.” After U.S. officials had held the prisoners in detention for 19 months, Margulies thought they had received all the information they could get. By then, according to the lawyer, his defendants as well as the other detainees were “in the punishing stage.”

From the Margulies viewpoint, his defendants hadn’t done anything that would justify this kind of punishment. He was convinced that Asif Iqbal, 21, Shafiq Rasul, 22, Mamdouh Habib, 47, and David Hicks, 26, most likely had not been top al-Qaida terrorists but only simple Taliban soldiers. The Pentagon made no statements on what the men were charged with. For Margulies, the question of guilt was irrelevant at that point. All he wanted for his defendants was due process, he said, a fair trial based on international law and the Geneva Convention.

“What distinguishes us from terrorists is our devotion to the rule of law,” he said. In order to reach his goal, Margulies filed in U.S. District Court, asking for due process. After this was dismissed, he went to the U.S. Court of Appeals, where he was dismissed once again. He hoped eventually to appeal his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. “I fully expect they will take the case and will decide that the Constitution does not allow holding people without process,” he said. “You cannot simply hold people and forget about them.”

In addition to the Supreme Court hearing, Joe Margulies prepared himself for another process after President George W. Bush announced that the first 6 Guantanamo detainees would be put before a military tribunal. One of them was Margulies’ defendant, David Hicks.

“It’s hard to prepare my arguments for his defense because we don’t even know what they are charged with,” Margulies said. In addition to this, Margulies didn’t know whether he would have any access to the tribunal. He said the Pentagon planned to give each defendant only a military lawyer under Pentagon supervision.

“We are working on trying to get representation for David in addition to military representation,” Margulies said. But even if he were allowed in, Margulies didn’t expect to experience much more than just another Alice in Wonderland situation.

For example, military tribunals, he said, unlike regular courts are entitled to make use of witness statements without having to disclose their origin. To the Pentagon, this was a security measure needed to prevent information from getting into the hands of terrorists. For Margulies, this was one of the reasons he didn’t expect the tribunal to be fair. The lawyer felt trapped in a corner. On the one hand, “You don’t want to dignify (the military tribunal) with your participation,” he said. “On the other hand, (my defendants) need a lawyer.”

Margulies was convinced that sooner or later the U.S. government would see Guantanamo as a big mistake. “I am a believer in our Bill of Rights,” he said. “It may take my lifetime and yours, but it will eventually prevail. Just as it did in the (World War II) Japanese internment cases. At that time people thought it was a great idea. We now recognize it as shameful. This will happen to Guantanamo as well.”