Jan. 6 suspects in a D.C. jail think Guantanamo would be better. I’ve got news for them.

The rosy picture the defendants have painted of the U.S. prison in Cuba does not resemble the realities of the detainees I've represented there.

When I saw that 34 Jan. 6 defendants signed a handwritten letter asking to be transferred from a Washington, D.C., jail to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, I raised an eyebrow like everyone else. The letter was submitted in court Friday and started trending on Twitter on Monday. 

I have represented Guantanamo Bay detainees for almost a decade. The rosy picture painted in that handwritten letter bears no resemblance to the reality of Guantanamo Bay.

While the Jan. 6 defendants are wrong about conditions at Guantanamo Bay, they are not wrong about their own prison circumstances.

One early major controversy was caused by guards’ desecrating Qurans — hardly “being respectful of religious requirements,” as the defendants wrote. Guantanamo Bay also doesn’t have the “centers for exercise/entertainment” the men think it has; I and other lawyers have fought — and lost, for now — a battle to allow them to continue creating and publicly sharing their artwork as a form of therapy for the torture they suffered at U.S. hands.

Far from having access to “top-notch medical care,” the men have no meaningful care for their serious medical conditions, many stemming from that torture. It took years of lawsuits to get an MRI machine down to Guantanamo Bay, where it eventually broke permanently — but not before it confirmed one of my clients’ brain damage from his CIA beatings.