Shearman & Sterling’s Thomas Wilner recalls the TV footage of detainees, clad in orange jumpsuits, being herded into open-air cages in Guantánamo in early 2002. “My first reaction was, ‘Thank God we got these guys who did this horrible thing to us,’” he says. Two months later, however, Wilner, then a partner in the firm’s Washington, D.C., office handling a variety of trade, litigation and government regulatory matters, got a call from some wealthy Kuwaiti families whose sons or husbands had gone missing in 2001. Could he help with a missing persons matter?
Ultimately, a dozen were found to be in U.S. custody at Guantánamo, and Wilner would represent all of them. He soon came to wonder whether his clients had been arrested by mistake. Families in Kuwait showed him evidence they said proved that their son or husband had gone to Afghanistan to do charitable work. Further investigation revealed that most had been arrested by Pakistani tribespeople and police after they had crossed the border to escape U.S. air strikes in Afghanistan and sold as “Arab terrorists” into U.S. custody for bounties.
