One of my favorite stories of the week is in the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section. It’s about a woman named Janet Hamlin, who has been working off-and-on for the last couple of years as a courtroom sketch artist in Guantanamo. Her most recent visit was early last month when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was to make an appearance in court:

Hamlin was escorted to a viewing room, separated from the court by glass. No binoculars or other visual aids were allowed, and audio was piped in on a twenty-second delay. “So it was like watching a bad Japanese movie,” she said. “Imagine yourself in a room behind the court, and K.S.M. was probably a few trees back,” she continued, looking out the window toward her back yard, where her dog, Molly, was yelping to be let in. “He had these big goggles on, with an elastic safety strap, and he would do this occasionally”—she craned her neck and raised her hand to an imaginary set of goggles—“and then look at me, as if posing.” Hamlin was surprised at K.S.M.’s vanity, given his famously unkempt appearance upon his apprehension, in 2003, but in captivity he had acquired a dignified look: much leaner, and with a Merlinesque gray beard. Hamlin did her best to sketch a decent likeness, but the goggles and the beard may have blinded her to the subtleties of his facial features. She gave him “quite the beak,” she admitted.
K.S.M. was not pleased. During a break in the proceedings, Hamlin saw Mohammed gesturing in disapproval as he examined her work. “They said, ‘Um, listen, K.S.M. doesn’t want to O.K. this,’ ” she recalled. “He says, ‘The nose is wrong, and tell the artist to go get my F.B.I. picture off the Internet and use that as a reference to fix it. ’ ” So began an hour-long process in which Hamlin was escorted to the media tent, where she printed out an image before returning—“always the gate, the search, the wand”—to make reparations. The picture was almost certainly not the F.B.I. photograph that K.S.M. had in mind. “It’s that one where he’s in a T-shirt, looking really dishevelled,” she said. Still, Mohammed had a point. Whatever the other indignities of the photo, which made him look like an especially hirsute D.W.I. offender, it showed a relatively short and slender nose compared with the proboscis that Hamlin had given him. She softened the edges before resubmitting it.

Now, KSM is the terrorist who famously said he would see his American captors in court, with his lawyers. With the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision, it seems pretty clear that we will soon have some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists using the courts to challenge the government on issues as big as jurisdiction in the war on terrorism and as small as whether their meals are the right temperature or whether they can have an iPod. Given this small anecdote, does anyone doubt that KSM will take a leading role in such efforts?