Let's say Gorman wants to review the written record of accusations against her clients. She must again travel to the secure facility. If she wants to use this material in preparing a defense for her clients, she must do all her work on secure government computers at the facility and use the facility's secure printer. If she uses her own computer at the facility, that computer becomes "tainted" and is subject to confiscation. Defense lawyers are not permitted to file any document with the court without first submitting it to the Court Security Office, which then shares the document with the government's lawyers. At times, the government's obsession with security borders on the absurd: When defense lawyers work on detainee cases in their own offices, they are supposed to draw the shades.

"Yes, I re-read Kafka during all of this," says Gorman. "Guantanamo is more Kafka than Kafka."

About whether those being held are dangerous:

Despite repeated claims by the Bush administration and its supporters in Congress that the vast majority of the detainees were "vicious killers" who had been "captured on the battlefield," it turns out that only about 5 percent of the detainees were captured by U.S. forces. Most of the rest -- 86 percent, according to a detailed study by Seton Hall University School of Law -- were rounded up by the Northern Alliance or Pakistani security forces in exchange for the reward money, or because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But what is most disturbing to Gorman and the other Guantanamo lawyers is that the CIA knew this almost from the beginning. A classified -- but widely leaked -- agency report from August 2002 concluded that the majority of the detainees had "no meaningful connection to Al Qaeda or the Taliban." Or, as Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, commander of Guantanamo's Delta Camp, told The Wall Street Journal, "Sometimes, we just didn't get the right folks."

Why are they still being held?

Aside from the 14 "high value" detainees who were brought to Guantanamo in September 2006, virtually all of the remaining 241 prisoners are being held because, as Hood put it, "nobody wants to be the one to sign the release papers."