Freedom fighter

THE first time Tom Wilner saw news images of detainees arriving at Guantanamo Bay, he felt the same way most of the other 300 million US citizens did in the wake of 9/11.

“I thought, isn’t it great they got the guys?” he says, recalling how he didn’t for a moment consider the now notorious orange jumpsuits or shackled hands and feet of the shuffling, hooded prisoners in any way excessive.

Just months later those same images represented to him a complete betrayal of all he understood about justice and the fundamental principles of the law in which he’d spent his life working.