Covington Partner Strips to Underwear to Illustrate Guantanamo Searches
Updated: A partner at Covington & Burling who represents 15 Guantanamo detainees took off his pants at a news conference in Yemen on Monday to illustrate the humiliating strip searches that his clients have to endure several times a day, the Wall Street Journal Law Blog reports.
The lawyer, David Remes, told the blog why he stripped to his underwear.
I’d been to Guantanamo in mid-June,” Remes said, “and there’s a certain amount of normalcy that has settled over the normal miserable conditions of confinement, which amount to solitary confinement without sleep and without sunlight and without anyone to talk to. So at the news conference, I said that, in addition to this torment, which has become so typical that we don’t even talk about it anymore, now the torment also consists of constant body searches in which the men are required to pull their shirts up to their chest, drop their pants, and then the corn-fed U.S. military sticks their thumbs under the prisoner’s underwear band and circles the prisoner’s torsos.”
The law blog has a photo of Remes in his underwear. He announced his resignation from Covington on Friday.
Updated on July 21 to includes news of Remes’ resignation.
