who were like any federal agent who wielded a gun. They were the bad guys.
After graduating and passing the bar in California, Judith Cochrane was hired by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy group that focused on civil rigd o='1em'>
After that, she worked for the ACLU for a dozen years, and then Human Rights Watch for several more. When Paul Laska funded the development of the Progressive Constitution Initiative, he’d recruited her personally to join the well-bankrolled liberal judicial advocacy group. He didn’t have to work too hard at getting her; Cochrane was thrilled to take a job that let her pick and choose her cases. Almost immediately after the start-up of the organization, the attacks of September 11, 2001, occurred, and to Judith Cochrane and her coworkers, that meant something truly terrible. She knew a witch hunt by the American government was on the horizon: Christians and Jews against Muslims.
For more than half a decade Cochrane was asked to appear on hundreds of television programs to talk about the evils of the U.S. government. She did as many appearances as she could while still defending her clients.
But when Ed Kealty was elected President, Judith Cochrane suddenly found herself blacklisted. She was surprised that the networks didn’t seem to care as much about civil rights when Kealty and his men ran the FBI, the CIA, and the Pentagon as they had during the Ryan years.
These days, with Kealty in the White House, Cochrane had as much time as she needed to work on her cases. She was unmarried with no children, and her work was her life. She had developed many close personal relationships with her clients. Relationships that could never lead to anything more than emotional closeness, as virtually all of her clients were separated from her by Plexiglas windows or iron bars.
She was also married, in the figurative sense, to her convictions, a lifelong love affair with her beliefs.
And it was these convictions that brought her here to supermax to meet with Saif Yasin.
She was led into the warden’s office, where the warden shook her hand and introduced her to a large black man in a starched blue uniform. “This is the unit commander for H. He will take you to Range 13 and to the FBI detail in charge of your prisoner. We don’t have actual custody of Prisoner 09341-000. We are essentially just the holding facility.”
“I understand. Thank you,” she said as she shook the uniformed man’s hand. “We’ll be seeing a lot of each other.”
The unit commander replied professionally, “Ms. Cochrane, this is just a formality, but we have our rules. May I see your state bar card?”
She reached into her purse and handed it over. The unit commander looked it over and handed it back to her.
The warden said, “This prisoner will be handled differently. I assume you have a copy of his Special Administrative Measures, as well as the directives for your meetings with him?”
“I have both of those documents. As a matter of fact, I have a team of attorneys preparing our response to them.”
“Your response?”
“Yes. We will be suing you shortly, but you must have known that already.”
“Well… I—”
Cochrane smiled thinly. “Don’t worry. For today, I promise to oblige your illegal SAMs.”
The unit commander was coe s taken aback, but the warden stepped in. He’d known Judith Cochrane long enough to remain unfazed, no matter what she said or accused him of. “We appreciate that. Originally we had planned to have you meet with him via ‘video visiting,’ like our other Special Housing Unit inmates, but the AG said you absolutely refused that arrangement.”
“I did. This man is in a cage, I understand that. But I need to have some rapport with him if I am to do my job. I can’t communicate with him on a television screen.”
The unit commander said, “We will take you to his cell. You will communicate to the prisoner via a direct phone line. It is not monitored; this has been ordered by the attorney general himself.”
“Very good.”
“We have a desk for you outside his cell. There is a partition of bulletproof glass; this will serve as an attorney/client visiting booth, just like if you were meeting with one of your other clients in the visitation center.”
She signed papers in the warden’s office, putting her name to agreements that had been worked up by the Justice Department and the Bureau of Prisons regarding what she could and couldn’t say to the prisoner, what he could and couldn’t say to her. As far as she was concerned it was all bullshit, but she signed it so she could get started on the man’s defense.
She’d worry about it later, and she’d violate her agreement if it was in the best interest of her client. Hell, she’d sued the Bureau of Prisons many times before. She was not going to let them tell her how she would represent her client.
Together she and the unit commander left the administration building, walked under a covered walkway to another wing of the prison. She was ushered through more locked doors, and on the other side she walked through an X-ray scanner just like those at airport security. On the other side of the scanner a set of doors opened, and here she was met by two men in black body armor and black ski masks, with rifles.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “Is all this really necessary?”
The unit commander stopped at the door. He said, “I have my responsibilities, and they end right here at the threshold of Range 13. You are now in the care of the FBI, who are operating the annex that houses your prisoner.” The unit commander extended a polite hand, and she shook it without really looking at him. Then she turned away, ready to follow the federal officers.
The FBI escorted her inside, and here they put her purse in a locker on the wall of the stark white room, then walked her through a full-body scanner. On the other side of this she was handed a legal pad and a single soft-tip marking pen, and then led through two sets of security doors that were monitored by closed-circuit cameras. Once through these, she found herself in an anteroom outside the recently modified cell. In front of her were four more armed HRT men.
The lead FBI SWAT officer spoke with a thick Brooklyn accent: “You understand the rules, Ms. Cochrane. You sit in the chair at the desk and talk on the phone to your client. Your conversations will be private. We will be right outside that door, and we can watch you on CCTV, but there is no microphone in this room or in the prisoner’s cell.” He handed her a small button that looked like her garage door opener. “Panic button,” he explained. “The prisoner couldn’t get through that glass with a Gatling gun, so there’s nothing to worry about, but if he does something that makes you feel uneasy, just press that button.”
Cochrane ='3hinnodded. She hated these smug men with their dehumanizing rules, their heinous weapons of hate, and their cowardly masks. Still, she was professional enough to feign kindness. “Wonderful. Thank you for your help. I’m sure I’ll be just fine.”
She turned away from the guard and looked around the room. She saw the window that looked into the cell, and she saw a wheeled desk had been put there, on this side, for her benefit. A telephone was on it. But she was not satisfied. “Officers, there should be a pass-through slot in the Plexiglas in case I need him to look at documents or sign something.”
The HRT officer in charge shook his head. “Sorry, ma’am. There is a hatch for us to send his food and clothing through, but it is locked up for your visit. You’ll have to talk to the warden about that for next time.” And with that, the HRT men, all four of them, backed through the door and shut it with a loud clang.
Judith Cochrane stepped to the little table by the glass and sat down, placed her pad in her lap with her pen, and only then did she look into the cell.
Saif Rahman Yasin sat on his concrete bed, facing the portal. He’d been reading from a Koran that he gently placed on the desk at the foot of the bed. When Cochrane looked to him, he took off his prison-issued eyeglasses and rubbed his eyes, and Judith immediately thought of a younger Omar Sharif. He stood and crossed the small cell toward her, sat down on a three-legged stool that had been placed next to a telephone on the floor. Judith noticed the red phone had no buttons or dials; it would connect him only with the receiver in her hand. Yasin lifted the telephone off the cradle and held it to his ear tentatively. He kept his face impassive, looked the woman in the eye,
