Legal Aid for Detainees

Legal Aid for Detainees

The headline for this story conflicts with the facts reported. (Farah
Stockman, "Potshot at Guantanamo lawyers backfires, Big firms laud free legal
aid for detainees," Boston Globe, January 29, 2007) You report "Doris Tennant
and Ellen Lubell have collected $7,000 in the past three weeks toward the
estimated $20,000 they expect to spend defending an Algerian detainee known as
Number 744."
If they are raising funds to pay for the legal work, it is not free and it
is not pro bono as Emily Rooney said on Tuesday March 27, 2007.
Aside from the financial distortions I am perplexed at why there is so much
energy available from attorneys who recruit these attorneys anxious to represent
detainees. Even Rooney no right-winger, suggested that there are many domestic
prisoners who live very similarly to the detainees who are accused of making war
on the United States and not being a part of any identifiable army.
Lubell and Tennant said that the detainees are fed through a slit on their
doors and must listen to prayers through the same slit. But they did not mention
the attacks on the guards, regular US Army soldiers, not corrections officers.
My question is for both Rooney and the Newton law partners. Why are there
no similar efforts to recruit lawyers to represent persons with disabilities who
have not been convicted of any crime nor have they been charged with making war
on the US. They are simply abused by police, prosecutors, politicians, academic
researchers, human services corporations, social services professionals, lawyers
and ordinary citizens who like to exploit and to abuse vulnerable persons.
I understand that the Boston Globe earns advertising revenue from the many
human services corporations. But Rooney appears on publicly funded television.
Nonetheless, Rooney and WGBH's president expressed the same attitudes toward
persons with disabilities as did Richard Gilman and the series of Globe editors.
They all see disability rights as a health care issue. They are unable to see
persons with disabilities as equal human beings with rights guaranteed to them
as strictly as to other citizens.
Why do these lawyers work so very hard to protect rights of persons with
questionable standing to them? Why are people innocent of any wrongdoing being
ignored by these and other allegedly concerned legal officers of the court?

Roy Bercaw, Editor ENOUGH ROOM

Potshot at Guantanamo lawyers backfires
Big firms laud free legal aid for detainees
By Farah Stockman,
Boston Globe Staff
January 29, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Two weeks after a senior Pentagon official suggested that
corporations should pressure their law firms to stop assisting detainees at
Guantanamo Bay, major companies have turned the tables on the Pentagon and
issued statements supporting the law firms' work on behalf of terrorism
suspects.

The corporate support for the lawyers comes as law associations and members of
Congress have expressed outrage at the remarks of Deputy Assistant Secretary of
Defense for Detainee Affairs Charles D. "Cully" Stimson on Jan. 11.

In a radio interview, Stimson stated the names of a dozen law firms that
volunteer their services to represent detainees, and he suggested that the chief
executives of the firms' corporate clients would make the lawyers "choose
between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms."

He said he expected the newly public list of law firms that do work at
Guantanamo Bay to spark a cycle of negative publicity for them. Instead, Stimson
himself became the center of nationwide criticism and later apologized for the
remarks.

The episode has become an embarrassing chapter in the Pentagon's long-running
battle with the detainees' lawyers and appears to have spurred public support
for the legal rights of the detainees, nearly 400 of whom just marked the start
of their sixth year of incarceration at the base.

Charles Rudnick , a spokesman for Boston Scientific Corp., said the company
supports the decision of its law firm, WilmerHale, to represent six men who were
arrested in Bosnia in 2001 "because our legal system depends on vigorous
advocacy for even the most unpopular causes."

Brackett Denniston, senior vice president and general counsel of General
Electric, said the company strongly disagrees with the suggestion that it
discriminate against law firms that do such work. "Justice is served when there
is quality representation even for the unpopular," Denniston said in a
statement.

Verizon issued a similar statement.

The lawyers have welcomed these expressions of solidarity from their paying
clients.

"It would seem [the Pentagon] made a miscalculation," said Stephen Oleskey , an
attorney at WilmerHale in Boston who has traveled to Guantanamo Bay seven times
since he took up the case in 2004. "We haven't had any clients call up and say,
'We are really deeply disturbed that you are advocating for fair hearings.' The
amount of support [we have gotten] has been heartening."

He said a committee at WilmerHale swiftly made the decision in 2004 to offer
free help to the detainees when a request went out from the Center for
Constitutional Rights, a New York-based nonprofit legal organization, which had
filed a petition in federal court on behalf of the detainees.

"As time has gone on, it has become plainer that it is an important issue for
our justice system," Oleskey said. "People have been more and more interested in
hearing about it. We have been asked to speak at universities, human rights
groups, and churches."

Michael Ratner , president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said that in
his early days of defending Guantanamo detainees he got hundreds of hate letters
from the public every time he spoke about the issue on television. But now, he
said, he receives only positive feedback, especially since Stimson's remarks.

"They miscalculated, that's for sure," said Ratner, who helps coordinate 500
lawyers and 120 law firms across the country to defend the detainees.

Support for the defense of Guantanamo detainees has become so widely accepted
that two Newton attorneys are defraying the cost of their trips to Guantanamo
Bay by collecting donations from the public.

Doris Tennant and Ellen Lubell have collected $7,000 in the past three weeks
toward the estimated $20,000 they expect to spend defending an Algerian detainee
known as Number 744. It is difficult to tell whether the controversy has made
fund-raising easier, Tennant said, because Stimson's remarks coincided with
their appeal for funds. But she said many of her supporters made reference to
Stimson as they voiced their support and sent in checks.

"It has been quite an outpouring," said Tennant, who hopes to make her first
visit to Guantanamo Bay next week.

That support is not what Stimson predicted when he gave a radio interview Jan.
11, the fifth anniversary of the day the detainees were brought to the base.

Stimson told the Washington-based Federal News Radio that the cause of detainees
was "not popular" with the American people and that the list of major law firms
representing the detainees was "shocking."

"I think quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are
representing the very terrorists who hurt their bottom line back in 2001, those
CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or
representing reputable firms," he said.

In the interview, he named about a dozen firms, including WilmerHale. He said
that corporations would become outraged when they realized that their legal fees
were subsidizing this kind of pro bono work.

In addition to the interview, a Wall Street Journal columnist quoted an unnamed
US official making similar remarks in a column that also included the names of
several top firms.

Now, some lawyers for detainees are accusing the Pentagon of an organized effort
to generate bad publicity for the firms.

Baltimore-based lawyer William J. Murphy , who represents a Kuwaiti detainee,
has filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking records of communications
between senior Pentagon officials and the media before the Jan. 11 interview in
a bid to uncover evidence of a smear campaign.

Some lawyers said publicizing the names of the law firms had achieved one of
Stimson's objectives -- distracting attention from the roughly 395 men who
remain imprisoned.

"It backfired to the extent that they didn't get the kind of support that they
were hoping," said Neil McGaraghan , a Boston-based attorney at Bingham
McCutchen, which represents a group of ethnic Uighurs from China at Guantanamo
Bay.

"But to the extent that it has drawn attention away from Guantanamo and focused
it on the lawyers, it has worked."