ACLU, law community undermine our security

If you haven’t read Debra Burlingame’s article at the Wall Street Journal entitled “Gitmo’s Indefensible Lawyers “, you really need to read the whole thing. Ms. Burlingame recounts the story of lawyers from Paul, Weiss legal firm’s distribution of Amnesty International-manufactured propaganda to their clients in order to undermine order and discipline among their clients in Guantanamo. The same propaganda that Anthony Camerino endorses for his own work with ACLU.

Majeed Abdullah Al Joudi, the detainee in whose cell the brochure was first found, told guards he received the brochure from his lawyer. An investigation by JTF-GTMO personnel revealed that Julia Tarver Mason, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, had sent it to Al Joudi and eight of the firm’s other detainee clients through “legal mail”—a designation for privileged lawyer-client communications that are exempt from screening by security personnel. Worse, the investigation showed that Ms. Mason’s clients passed it to other detainees not represented by Paul, Weiss lawyers. In all, more than a dozen detainees received a copy.

The Amnesty International brochure, handed out at a human rights conference in London, was a political advocacy screed in clear violation of that order, which was formulated to protect force security. Maj. Gen. Hood made a command decision. He banned the Paul, Weiss lawyers from access to Guantanamo. The DOJ notified the firm.

In fact, from al Qaeda’s perspective, the Amnesty International brochure was better than the Manchester Manual. It cued detainees that the abuses at Abu Ghraib “were not an aberration.” The brochure told them that images from the Iraqi prison were consistent with “numerous allegations of torture and ill-treatment reported from detention centres in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay.”

The message to the detainees was clear: If you want to claim you are being tortured, here is a vast menu of examples from which to choose.

And of course, it can only get worse under the current administration who are only too willing to capitulate to their friends, the litigation-hungry cretins at the powerful law firms.

Other incidents listed in the FOIA material included: a lawyer who was caught in the act of making a hand-drawn map of a detention camp’s layout, including guard towers; a lawyer who sent a letter to his detainee client telling him that “we cannot depend on the military to do the right thing” and conveying his message of support to other detainees who were not his clients; lawyers who posted photos of Guantanamo security badges on the Internet; lawyers who provided news outlets with “interviews” of their clients using questions provided in advance by the news organization; and a lawyer who gave his client a list of all the detainees.

Makes you wonder why we even allow these imbeciles near detainees, doesn’t it?

ADDED: At Ace of Spades, DrewM sets the lawyers of the John Adams Project straight.

Category: Legal, Terror War, Usual Suspects