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by William
Glaberson and Neil A. Lewis
April 4, 2008, NYT
WASHINGTON — The
American Civil Liberties Union and one of the country’s leading lawyers’
groups, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said
Thursday that they had assembled experienced teams of lawyers to defend
some of the most notorious detainees at Guantánamo, including Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed, who has said he was the chief planner of the Sept. 11
attacks.
The joint
statement by the two groups said they were preparing an $8 million
program to oppose vigorously the government’s prosecutions of at least
seven of the detainees who were once held in secret Central Intelligence
Agency prisons.
Those detainees,
five of whom have been charged with participation in the Sept. 11
attacks, include men who were held in harsh conditions and subjected to
aggressive interrogation techniques like waterboarding. The groups
portrayed their effort as part of an American tradition of providing
vigorous representation to unpopular defendants.
The groups said
the Pentagon had not provided adequate financing to military defense
lawyers who are to be assigned to represent all detainees charged with
war crimes in a process that the groups said permitted convictions based
on “secret evidence, hearsay and confessions derived from torture.”
They also made
clear that the lawyers provided by the groups were expecting to use the
detainees’ cases to expose what they see as flaws in the Bush
administration’s war-crimes system. “Our involvement cannot cure the
fundamental flaws of this process,” said Anthony D. Romero, executive
director of the A.C.L.U.
“We are stepping
into the ring to make the proceedings as fair as possible because we
believe strongly in defending fundamental American values and
challenging the government’s attempts to stack the deck in its favor.”
A Pentagon
spokesman for the Office of Military Commissions, Maj. Bobby Don
Gifford, said the military had “gone to great lengths to provide a
system that is full, fair and just” and had exercised all possible
efforts to provide the resources necessary so that defense lawyers could
adequately represent the detainees.
The chief military
defense lawyer for the Guantánamo cases, Col. Steven David, said he knew
few details of the groups’ proposal but welcomed it. “It is a huge
development in terms of the resources that might be available to the
accused,” Colonel David said. A detainee would have the right to accept
or reject a lawyer. None of the men the groups are offering to represent
has been arraigned at the war-crimes tribunal in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The groups said
they had the resources to provide financing for the project, which is to
involve paying experienced criminal defense lawyers and death penalty
experts. But they said they were seeking foundation grants and other
sources of financing.
Many Guantánamo
detainees have long been represented by volunteer American lawyers in
civil cases contesting their imprisonment, and several detainees who are
facing war-crimes charges also have civilian lawyers who have worked
with military defense lawyers.
In some cases
there has been friction between the civilian and the military lawyers.
One lawyer who is involved in the military defense effort said Thursday
that there could be tensions over the extent to which legal efforts
focus on defending individual detainees and how much they focus on
challenging the entire military commission system.
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