While the detainees knew nothing about developments in the United States, the Family Committee, working with the Core Team, hired US counsel and brought lawsuits challenging their detention. The US government took a hard line, denying that detainees had any rights at all in US courts and succeeded in the lower courts. The Family Committee’s petition to the Supreme Court was granted, and the Court found that detainees had a statutory right to habeas hearings in US courts. Congress promptly eliminated the statute to try to strip the courts of a basis to hear the cases. The Bush administration also tried to avoid judicial scrutiny by creating “due process lite” administrative hearings conducted by the Department of Defense that provided no lawyers, no meaningful access to evidence, and military representatives who could argue for continued detention. Ultimately, the issue of whether there was a right to a habeas hearing under the Constitution went to the Supreme Court, which finally ruled after six years that the detainees had a right to challenge their detention in US federal courts. But the Supreme Court left it to lower courts to define the process, and those courts erected further hurdles.

The introduction presents the background to the writing of the book. The author is an experienced Guantanamo lawyer who represented many detainees, including the last two Kuwaiti detainees, and was asked by Kuwaiti colleagues and friends to tell the stories of the twelve Kuwaiti detainees their lives before Guantanamo, how they were captured, their torture and treatment at Guantanamo, how they came to be released, and how they have tried to rebuild their lives after their long ordeals. The Core Team is introduced, a Kuwaiti lawyer, Abdul Rahaman Al Haroun, an American lawyer, William Brown, both based in Kuwait, and their colleague in Washington, Marcia Newell. These three strategized and fought every day for fourteen years until the last of the Kuwaitis was released.