In idle wishes fools supinely stay.
— George Crabbe, The Birth of Flattery (1792)
The stars are aligned. Guantanamo detainees and their prosecutors wish for the same thing-fewer lawyers. Alberto Gonzales has gone to court to see if the judges will grant their wishes.
For the Justice Department the wish makes sense. When there are as many detainees as there are in Guantanamo, it is not only aggravating but time consuming to have the detainees working with defense lawyers who do nothing but clutter up the system with meaningless procedural and substantive arguments. From the detainees’ points of view, visits by lawyers disrupt the pleasant routine they enjoy on a daily basis. The conjunction of prosecution and detainee wishes came about during late April and early May.
On April 27 the Justice Department said it planned to ask the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to do a number of things that would reduce the number of lawyers mucking about in Guantanamo. It wanted the court to rule that a detainee may only have one visit with a lawyer he is considering hiring to decide if the lawyer strikes his fancy. When the detainee has hired a lawyer, Mr. Gonzales wants to limit to three the number of conferences lawyer and client can have before having a hearing. Mr. Gonzales also wants permission to read all the correspondence the lawyer and the detainee exchange. He wants to deny the few lawyers who survive this gauntlet the right to see the secret evidence military panels use to convince themselves that a detainee is an enemy combatant and not someone who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Mr. Gonzales withdrew the wish that lawyer and client could meet no more than three times before trial a few days before the May 15 hearing was to take place in the Court of Appeals saying: “Based on a current evaluation of resources and needs at Guantanamo, the [government] has decided this provision is no longer warranted.”)
The detainees knew nothing of the hearing that took place on May 15 since detainees are not permitted to know anything about anything since if they knew anything about anything they would use the information in furtherance of terrorist activities. Had they known, however, many of them would have supported Mr. Gonzales’s request. According to the New York Times, some of the detainees are now refusing to see their lawyers, others are declining to accept mail and still others when seeing their lawyers refuse to give them the kind of information the lawyers think they need in order to properly represent their clients. According to Mark Denbeaux, a lawyer representing two of the detainees, “Every lawyer is afraid every time they go down there, that their clients won’t see them”.
In fairness to the detainees, it should be observed that their reasons for not wanting to see lawyers differ ever so slightly from the reasons Mr. Gonzales doesn’t want them to see lawyers. Mr. Gonzales says that the lawyers visiting detainees cause “intractable problems and threats to security at Guantanamo.” Their presence “causes unrest on the base” since lawyers may tell their clients what is going on in the outside world and that kind of information can “incite violence among the detainees”.
The detainees, on the other hand, do not want to see lawyers because, as one detainee reportedly wrote his lawyer, “Your role is to polish Bush’s shoes and make the picture look good”. Some detainees believe that their lawyers are simply investigators for the government and that whatever they tell their lawyers may be used against them. As a result of these beliefs, up to a third of the detainees are refusing to see their lawyers, or, seeing them, refuse to impart the kind of information the lawyers believe they need in order to adequately represent their clients. One lawyer who represents 17 Yemini defendants was quoted in the New York Times as saying the relationship between lawyer and client is “very strained and tense”. Another lawyer said his clients said: “We all know that everything we say in these rooms is being monitored by them.” Detainees fear that their correspondence is not confidential, citing as one reason for their concern the seizure of more than 1,100 pounds of correspondence and legal material from detainees in 2005 after three suicides had taken place at Guantanamo.
If the court sides with Mr. Gonzales, everyone should be happy, except, of course those who believe detainees are entitled to good and thorough legal representation. They don’t understand what Mr. Gonzales means when he says: “There is no right on the part of counsel to access to detained aliens on a secure military base in a foreign country.” They believe that if a person has a right to counsel the right must be meaningful and not defined by the prosecution. They do not realize that this is not 2007-it is 1984.
Christopher Brauchli
brauchli.56@post.harvard.edu
For political commentary see my web page http://humanraceandothersports.com
If they can drum up a war with a contrived enemy on fabricated cause, why not turn JUSTICE itself into a travesty and call it by other names. In the Bush-Rove-Cheney-Rice-Gonzales universe words are endowed with the meanings the decider elects them to hold. As if they are accountable to no one, as if this is what JESUS would do. BLASPHEMERS! If there is such a thing as the anti-Christ, these murderers who hide behind the cloak of Christianity’s NAME certainly are contenders for the title. Never forget, Bush and Rice are 4 letter words…
Congress,congress;more war less Constitution,it just leaves me with my mouth agape.
Do you see?
Do you see where this people go with this law “the military commissions act of 2006”?
Did we not cross the Rubicon when we went to Iraq and utterly destroy a nation and murder over 600,000 children, men and women that had nothing to do with what happened on 9/11?
A secrecy in a government “of the people, for the people and by the people”? To protect a corrupt cabal, to be sure, and a word, homeland, brought from an earlier time in Germany. Is this de javu?
To propose a law so diametrically opposed to the Constitution sent my heart into a tailspin and to see the congress breach their oath to defend the Constitution with a bevy of excuses that would stump a teen. It makes me sick.
Fear is a cancer, safety is not freedom and only freedom under the Constitution would guarantee what safety we would have. This is not politics to me, this is the most serious of attacks undermining this nation. The road to an oven.
Support the troops? So long as they are someone else’s. Is not this a nation of 300 million and in war are not all to sacrifice? Show me where this is so. It is an abomination. The German said: They came for other different peoples but not him until finally they came for him. He did not speak up and there was none to speak for him. Will they come for you?
Read ‘em and weep, Tony
Samuel Adams:
“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom,-go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
Just a tiny nitpick, MustBeFree (mainly because I’ve read this word in other posts): When the Nazis came to power, their propaganda speeches always referred to Germany as the FATHERLAND, not the homeland. How do I know this? My late husband was a little boy in Germany during WWII.
Yes, “Fatherland” was used during WWII, but “Homeland” (”Heimat” or “Heimatland” in German) was also used–although the term was reinterpreted in non-Nazi fashion in the postwar period. http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:_JidlxCjgUoJ:www.lse.ac.uk/collections/CIS/papers/Griffiths_affirmation%2520of%2520the%2520everyday.pdf+heimat+homeland
I despise the word “homeland”, it’s a demagogue’s word. Also, I just don’t understand why Bushco is competent in only one area of governance and that is the taking away pf our constitutional rights. Why would they amass so much executive power only to turn it over to Hillary? It doesn’t make sense. I don’t think bush is leaving. The coup that began on September 11 2001 will continue with another tragic happening. Only a few people will care enough to hit the streets and they will be easily disposed of some little “camp” somewhere. I hate to think this way and if someone can give me some hope to hold onto now that the dems have rolled over…..
Brauchli writes:
They believe that if a person has a right to counsel the right must be meaningful and not defined by the prosecution. They do not realize that this is not 2007-it is 1984.
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It’s also like Alice in Wonderland without the pleasent side effects of halucinogenic drugs.
magikpokerwoman: There’s so many different ways to look at this. I’ve often contemplated the Bush camp supporters scrambling to deny executive privilege if we should actually have an election and a democrat should win…
On the other hand. Hillary and Obama are both un-electable. I know it’s foolish to make predictions, but I just can’t help myself: if Hillary is the candidate we will have one of the biggest election debacles ever witnessed by western democracy, and the republicans will retain control of the White House. Obama is at least one presidential term too early (speaking of him- not the general electorate) as a candidate.