US fires Guantanamo defence team

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1098523,00.html

US fires Guantanamo defence team

The Guardian (London) Wednesday December 3, 2003
        James Meek

A team of military lawyers recruited to defend alleged terrorists held by 
the US at Guantanamo Bay was dismissed by the Pentagon after some of its 
members rebelled against the unfair way the trials have been designed, the 
Guardian has learned.

And some members of the new legal defence team remain deeply unhappy with 
the trials -known as "military commissions" - believing them to be slanted 
towards the prosecution and an affront to modern US military justice.

Of the more than 600 detainees at the US prison camp at Guantanamo, none 
has been charged with any crime, and none has had access to a lawyer, 
although some have been in captivity of one kind or another for two years.

But the US has repeatedly promised that at least some of the prisoners 
will be charged and tried by military commissions, an arcane form of 
tribunal based on long-disused models from the 1940s.

When charged, a prisoner will be assigned a uniformed military defence 
lawyer. The prisoners have a theoretical right to a civilian lawyer, but 
the US has placed financial and bureaucratic obstacles in the way of this.

A former military lawyer with good contacts in the US military legal 
establishment said that the first group of defence lawyers the Pentagon 
recruited for Guantanamo balked at the commission rules, which insist, 
among other restrictions, that the government be allowed to listen in to 
any conversations between attorney and client.

"There was a circular that went out to military lawyers in the early 
spring of 2003 which said 'we are looking for volunteers' for defence 
counsel," said the ex-military lawyer. "There was a selection process, and 
the people they selected were the right people, they had the right 
credentials, they were good lawyers.

"The first day, when they were being briefed on the dos and don'ts, at 
least a couple said: 'You can't impose these restrictions on us because we 
can't properly represent our clients.'

"When the group decided they weren't going to go along, they were 
relieved. They reported in the morning and got fired that afternoon."

The Pentagon's recently set up Office of Military Commissions denied the 
claim. "That is not true, never happened," said its spokesman, Major John 
Smith. "The military commission is a tool of justice. I expect some of 
these individuals [on Guantanamo] will plead not guilty, and will be 
represented zealously by their lawyers."

Yet the Guardian understands from a uniformed source with intimate 
knowledge of the mood among the current military defence team, six lawyers 
strong, that there is deep unhappiness about the commission set-up.

"It's like you took military justice, gave it to a prosecutor and said, 
'modify it any way you want'," the source said. "The government would like 
to say we have done these commissions before. But what happened after [the 
Nazi cases] was the military justice system changed. What we have done is 
stupid. It is, I would say, an insult to the military, to the evolution of 
the military justice system. They want to take us back to 1942."

Two Britons, Moazzam Begg and Feroz Abassi, are among the Guantanamo 
prisoners that President George Bush has "designated" for trial. The 
military defence lawyers in Washington are still waiting for permission to 
fly to Guantanamo.

In an investigation into the Guantanamo prison camp, the Guardian has also 
learned that a number of prisoners, thought to be between two and five, 
are kept permanently isolated in a super-secure facility within the main 
prison camp at Guantanamo, Camp Delta.