Guantanamo Defense Lawyers Fired By Pentagon
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…
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…
“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 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.”
Similar stories at BBC News, The Scotsman, Al-Jazeera, and The Sydney Morning Herald.
I would say that we need a Constitutional Amendment to stop this administration’s behavior, but as it turns out, we already have several intended to do just that.
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