"He believes his treatment has been illegal," Prince said. "I believe it's been illegal too. And I personally believe that he cannot, as a result of all these things, get a fair trial."
Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, the legal advisor at Guantanamo Bay, disputed that view. "The system that we have here, the military commission system, is extraordinarily fair in terms of the number of protections it provides for any of the accused," he said.
Jeffrey F. Addicott, a former senior Pentagon advisor to the military commissions, agreed that the case almost certainly would end up at the Supreme Court. Addicott, a law professor and director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University in Texas, predicted a legal battle involving some of the most contentious issues in the nation's counter-terrorism campaign, including what constitutes torture and what kind of evidence can be used against suspected terrorists.
Prince and his associates, Addicott said, "are good defense counsel, and they will throw as much mud on the wall as they can and see what sticks."
A year ago this week, Prince was working in Richmond, Va., looking forward to some "us time" with his wife after their two daughters graduated from high school and went off to college. He enjoys yardwork and long-distance runs.
When he was recalled to active duty, "I assumed I'd get a desk job in Washington," said Prince, who smiles frequently, exposing a slight gap between his two front teeth.
Instead, he was sent to Iraq for six months as a Navy legal advisor for detainee operations. Superiors knew of his background as a veteran defense attorney with a reputation for tenacity and his recent two-year stint as a senior Reserve advisor on military prosecutions. While he was still in Iraq last December, they asked if Prince would consider representing one of the high-value detainees who might soon be facing charges in the Sept. 11 attacks, perhaps even Mohammed himself.
"They said, 'This may be perceived as the Nuremberg of our times, and people might think ill of you for doing this,' " Prince said. "They asked, 'How would you deal with people calling you a traitor, defending the most hated man in the world?' "
That question was easy, Prince recalled: "I said, 'I'm a defense attorney; I get that all the time.' "
