American Bar Association Legal Aid Offer for Detainees Is Retracted: Challenge to government

[DeepModem Mom]

Source: New York Times

By WILLIAM GLABERSON
Published: September 29, 2007

The American Bar Association said this week that it was backing out of an agreement to find lawyers for Guantánamo detainees because it did not want to “lend support and credibility” to what it called inadequate legal protections for the 340 men held there. The bar association, the largest lawyers’ group in the United States, said it had agreed to help find volunteer lawyers before Congress stripped the courts of the power to hear habeas corpus cases, which are challenges by prisoners on the government’s authority to hold them.

The move was the latest chapter in a broad legal debate over what rights Guantánamo detainees may have in contesting findings that they are enemy combatants who can be held indefinitely.

“It would be inconsistent with the A.B.A.’s strong position” against limits on detainees’ filing habeas cases, the bar association president, William H. Neukom, said in a letter to the Justice Department on Thursday. He added that participating in finding lawyers for less expansive cases would “lend support and credibility to such an inadequate review scheme.”

A 2005 law said detainees could only contest their status in far more restrictive cases, which limit detainees to arguing that military officials violated their own procedures. The association’s concern, reported yesterday in The Washington Post, is one of a series of challenges to the government’s insistence that the narrower cases are the only legal vehicle available to detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba....

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/29/us/nationalspecial3/29gitmo.html

[movonne]

1. Why are the dems doing something about shutting down Guantanamo???they

don't seem to know how (or want to) stop the war but maybe they might be able to do this..(or not) (or don't want to) or whatever excuse they can make...

[midnight]

2. This is a very good question.... I wonder what can be done?

I read that a large percentage of these prisoners were turned in by people who were paid money to give out names. That in it self is not evidence, and it would be interesting if this so the light of a court room.

[Kagemusha]

3. Because it's bad politics to take the side of the untouchables.

And since the details are secret, they have no way of adequately assessing whether the administration's claims about the perfidy of the prisoners are true or not. So, out of fear, they take the safe, "moderate" road.