Well, they are on an island

More hijinx at Guantanamo.

LONDON, Sept. 28 — Clive Stafford Smith is accustomed to prison bureaucracies and their censorship, having represented men on death row for many years. As one of the leading lawyers for the inmates at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he has been prohibited from giving his clients a range of reading material, from Runner’s World to Arabic translations of “Cinderella.”

But Mr. Stafford Smith, who lives in England, was not prepared for a letter he received a few weeks ago. A commander at Guantánamo advised him that authorities were investigating “contraband being surreptitiously being brought into the camp.”

The suspected smugglers? Mr. Stafford Smith and Zachary Katznelson, another lawyer at Mr. Stafford Smith’s nonprofit organization in Britain.

The contraband? Speedo swimsuits and Under Armour briefs, the commander wrote.

Calling the charges “patently absurd,” Mr. Stafford Smith, 48, immediately wrote back that as a lawyer his job “involves legal briefs, not the other sort.”

At Guantánamo, lawyers are thoroughly searched before going into a small cell with their clients, and any potential contraband seized. “Does anyone seriously suggest that Mr. Katznelson or I have been stripping off to deliver underpants to our clients?” Mr. Stafford Smith asked.

But a spokesman for the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo, Lt. Col. Edward M. Bush III of the Army, said the investigation was no joke. “Contraband items are taken very seriously,” he wrote in an e-mail response to a reporter. “They may be used in such a way to conduct harm or self-harm for which the Joint Task Force remains liable.”

Still, Mr. Stafford Smith was baffled by the idea of smuggled Speedos. His client, he wrote, “is hardly in a position to go swimming, since the only available water is the toilet in his cell.”