From the Guardian Online 'Comment is free ...' section, prominent lawyer Clive Stafford Smith probably best known in the USA for his representation of prisoners awaiting capital punishment and vocal opponent of the death penalty has
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/clive_stafford_smith/2007/01/how_low_can_you_go.html">this to say about the latest DoD tactic to deflect criticism of Guantanamo Bay as it begins its fifth year ...
How Low Can You Go?The ink was barely dry on all the criticisms issued on the five-year anniversary of Guantánamo Bay before the US department of defence began its desperate riposte. On the day of the anniversary, January 11 2007, Cully Stimson, a "deputy assistant secretary of defence for detainee affairs" went on Federal News Radio to launch an assault on the law firms who represent the prisoners.
In spite of there being no evidence that any work is carried out on anything but a
pro bono basis Mr. Stimson slanders all the lawyers involved by stating ...
The interviewer then asks who is paying for all this legal help. "It's not clear, is it?" says the deputy secretary, playing coy. "Some will maintain that they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, that they're doing it pro bono, and I suspect they are; others are receiving moneys from who knows where, and I'd be curious to have them explain that."
He does approve, he says, of some pro bono work by lawyers. He identifies the "worthwhile" tasks that lawyers can take on, such as work for "homeless people, people who have been abused in domestic violence cases, et cetera." But representing people held without trial for five years is apparently beyond the pale of permissible do-gooding, since the deputy secretary expresses total certainty that there are now no innocent people among the 395 prisoners left on the base.
Unsurprisingly Mr. Stafford-Clark is sickened by the attack on the defence lawyers and comments later ...
Meanwhile, despite the DoD intimation that all these prisoners were responsible for September 11 nobody has yet been formally charged, or allowed a trial. But an academic review by Seton Hall law school of the military's informal allegations demonstrates that with regard to 55% of the prisoners, not even the military contends that they committed a hostile act against the United States.
It appears that Stimpson, almost certainly at the behest of his masters at the DoD, asserts that representing innocent people detained without charge or trial on a
pro bono basis is terrorism. On that basis he urges business leaders throughout the US to dispense with the services of the legal firms involved.
Stafford-Clark concludes
To suggest that American businesses should fire their legal team because lawyers are standing up for justice is reprehensible, reminiscent of Senator Joe McCarthy's attempt to blacklist many fellow Americans as communists in the 1950s. Perhaps a more appropriate inquiry would be to ask who in the Bush administration authorised these extraordinary DoD comments.
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