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PROFESSOR JOE MARGULIES GUANTÁNAMO COULD HAPPEN AGAIN JOE MARGULIES IS PROFESSOR OF THE PRACTICE OF GOVERNMENT AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY, THOUGH HE CONFESSES HE DOESN’T REALLY KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS. BUT HE DOES KNOW, AS DO WE, THAT BY TALENT AND DARING, JOE IS THE LEADER OF THE GUANTÁNAMO BAR ASSOCIATION. AT THE SPRING MEETING IN KEY BISCAYNE, PROFESSOR MARGULIES DESCRIBED THE HISTORY OF THE FIRST HABEAS CORPUS CASE RELATED TO GUANTÁNAMO AND WARNED US THAT EVEN IF THIS GUANTÁNAMO ENDS, THE COLLEGE MUST BE ON GUARD FOR THE NEXT ONE THAT WILL TAKE ITS PLACE. Professor Margulies thanked the College for its steadfast leadership in fighting for those imprisoned in Guantánamo, including the thirty or so men still held twenty-one years later. In 2005, the College was asked for volunteers to represent the then 780 men imprisoned. We answered the call. Our volunteers included fellows no longer with us: Mike Mone of Boston; Mike Cooper of New York; the great Tom Sullivan of Chicago and fifty-seven other volunteers, including our President-Elect, Bill Murphy. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, people in the United States were shocked and angry. Few of us criticized our descent into the Dark Side. In January 2002, the United States opened a prison on the grounds of the Guantánamo Naval Base. The government refused to say who it held, insisted the prisoners could be held incommunicado, and claimed the men were not entitled to access the courts. In 2002, Professor Margulies filed a petition for habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia seeking the release of his four clients held at the base. His team faced death threats, were pilloried in the press, and were called unpatriotic communists. The District Court dismissed the Rasul petition, and the Court of Appeals affirmed. The case arrived in the Supreme Court for 2003-2004 term. Professor Margulies was certain he would win the case: “The damn case tried itself” he said. The petition alleged: “You’re telling me that the government’s position is it can pick up anybody from anywhere in the world, bring them to a U.S. prison on a U.S. military base in a space subject to the complete dominion and control of the United States; it can subject them to whatever conditions of confinement it wants; it can hold them incommunicado and it can conduct any interrogations it wants, for as long as it wants, and nobody gets to say anything at all?” “Think long and hard before you answer this question, brother. Is that your posi- tion? And when the government said, ‘yes, it is,’ I knew we would win. I figured it would take a little while, but I knew we’d win. It did and we did.” “Now it helped that eight days after the oral argument in Rasul, we were treat- ed on the front page of every newspaper in the country to the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison, and every day, on the front page of every paper, was a picture and a headline that might as well have said: Dear members of the United States Su- preme Court, this is what happens when you create a prison beyond the law. Oh, look, here’s one with a dog collar and a leash. Yeah.” The work of Professor Margulies and his colleagues established the right of the men in Guantánamo to challenge their deten- tion in federal court. Fellows copied his 43 JOURNAL