Col. Will A. Gunn

After earning his J.D. in 1986, Gunn joined the Air Force's legal team as an assistant to a judge in California. Two years later, he became a defense counselor, fulfilling a lifelong dream.

In 1990, Gunn moved to Washington as a White House Fellow, where he served as the liaison to the VA. under President George H.W. Bush. One year later, he returned to law as a trial attorney for the Air Force's General Litigation Division in Rosslyn, Va. He earned a master's degree in environmental law from George Washington University School of Law in 1994.

After graduating, Gunn taught at the military's Judge Advocate General School in Alabama for two years. In 1996, he became a staff judge advocate in Fort Braff North Carolina. He returned to defense work as chief circuit defense counsel for the Air Force in Texas in 2000.

In 2002, Gunn returned to school. He earned a master's in national resource strategy from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces.

Defending Guantanamo

In January 2003, Gunn was given a controversial appointment as the first chief defense counsel for the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay. "My first reaction was, is somebody trying to torpedo my career?" he told the New Yorker in 2004. His friends warned him against taking the position, and even his minister was ambivalent.

Still, Gunn said, after careful consideration, he knew he had to accept the position. "There are people I know, people I respect putting their lives on the line," he said in a WhoRunsGov interview. "All that I was being asked to risk is my career."

Gunn assembled a staff of six lawyers charged with the challenging task of assisting some of the most unpopular clients in the world in a difficult legal environment. Gunn's clients faced no right to appeal and flexible evidence rules. "The mantra that you will hear from me is that our first obligation is to insure full and fair trials," Gunn told the New Yorker. "I feel it's my obligation to hold the government to that."

In a major step, Gunn also directly challenged the U.S. government position in a Supreme Court brief in Fawzi Al Odah v. United States. His team of lawyers argued that the detainees risked falling into a "legal black hole" and that they deserved access to federal courts.

Gunn's positions were not popular. "The joint task force's mission is to detain enemy combatants and develop intelligence to win the global war on terror," Geoffrey D. Miller, an Army general who led the Joint Task Force Guantanamo, told the New Yorker in 2004. "We are not about law enforcement, or rehabilitation, or punishment."

Gunn also struggled to find civilian lawyers defend Guantanamo detainees. Some argued this was because many lawyers thought the court had stacked the deck against them. "It would be unethical for any attorney to agree to the conditions they've set," Don Rehkopf, co-chairman of the National Association of Criminal Defense, told the New York Times. The commission "is a total farce."

Boys and Girls Club of Greater Washington

In 2005, Gunn retired from the Air Force and took over as chief executive of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Washington, which serves thousands of young people. During his tenure, the organization accumulated a multimillion-dollar deficit, declined in enrollment and failed to redevelop four of its properties. In March 2008, Gunn was forced to resign. "They want to make a change in the way the organization is run," Gunn told The Washington Post in 2008.

After he left the Boys and Girls Club, Gunn started his own law firm in Alexandria, Va. He focused his practice on representing servicemen and veterans.

Gunn said several friends encouraged him to apply for a position in the Obama administration but that he was only interested in one job - that of general counsel. "It wasn't so much about serving in he administration as it was being in the right position," he said.

In May 2009, he was confirmed as general counsel of the VA, which has a staff of more than 460 lawyers. "I look forward to helping lead a transformation at VA to make the department more people-centric, results oriented, and forward looking than ever before," he said in June 2009.

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