The shameful lawyers of Gitmo

Debra Burlingame and Thomas Joscelyn:

On the evening of Jan. 26, 2006, military guards at Guantanamo Bay made an alarming discovery during a routine cell check. Lying on the bed of a Saudi detainee was an 18-page color brochure. The cover consisted of the now famous photograph of newly-arrived detainees dressed in orange jumpsuits—masked, bound and kneeling on the ground at Camp X-Ray—just four months after 9/11. Written entirely in Arabic, it also included pictures of what appeared to be detainee operations in Iraq. Major General Jay W. Hood, then the commander of Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, concurred with the guards that this represented a serious breach of security.

Maj. Gen. Hood asked his Islamic cultural adviser to translate. The cover read: "Cruel. Inhuman. Degrades Us All: Stop Torture and Ill-Treatment in the 'War on Terror.'" It was published by Amnesty International in the United Kingdom and portrayed America and its allies as waging a campaign of torture against Muslims around the globe.

"One thread that runs through many of the testimonies from prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq, and from Guantanamo," the brochure read, "is that of anti-Arab, anti-Islamic, and other racist abuse."

How did the detainee get it? More importantly, who gave it to him?

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.

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There is much more about the lawyers who are working to free people many of whom have returned to terrorism. Why lawyers want to give their services to people trying to kill us is a question they need to answer. So far, I have not heard a satisfactory answer. These lawyers service have no relationship to that of John Adams. At the time he represented the British soldiers charged in the "Boston Massacre" we were not at war with Britain and like the soldiers he was a British citizen. There is no record that he ever represented a British POW after we were at war with them.

These issues pose a fundamental question about helping the enemy wage a lawfare campaign against the government trying to defend us. These enemy detainees should be held until the end of the war and they should not have access to the courts other than the military commissions if they are charged with a war crime. I realize that the Supreme Court has given habeas corpus rights to the detainees. This was a mistake that these lawyers are apparently exploiting.