A Handful of Walnuts

We brought the original litigation against the lawlessness of Guantánamo Bay in February 2002, shortly after it opened for its sordid business. By mid-2004, the Supreme Court had ordered that lawyers be allowed access and I was able to visit for the first time. Soon, I was requested to represent Ahmed Errachidi. When I first went to see him, in early 2005, the soldiers at Guantánamo warned me that he was one of the very worst: a bitter terrorist; Osama bin Laden’s general, his main man. I was intrigued.

He didn’t seem bitter. He laughed: a deep-chested laugh. He told me that he was a chef who had worked in London for eighteen years. I was not sure I believed him, but Ahmed’s story – stranger than fiction – turned out to be entirely true. I took the Tube from one restaurant to another on his list, and each manager described his cooking. He said he was bipolar, and I obtained the medical records of his first mental breakdown, following the death of his father. I spoke with the immigration lawyers who had been trying to secure him permanent leave to remain in the UK. I obtained copies of his plane tickets from London to Morocco and Pakistan. At the time he was meant to have been at the al-Farouq terrorist-training camp, in July 2001, he was temping on the King’s Road in Chelsea.