Pro Bono Lawfirms Threatened by Gitmo Official for Defending Detainees

The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation's top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms' corporate clients should consider ending their business ties.

The comments by Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, produced an instant torrent of anger from lawyers, legal ethics specialists and bar association officials, who said Friday that his comments were repellent and displayed an ignorance of the duties of lawyers to represent people in legal trouble.

"This is prejudicial to the administration of justice," said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University and an authority on legal ethics. "It's possible that lawyers willing to undertake what has been long viewed as an admirable chore will decline to do so for fear of antagonizing important clients.

"We have a senior government official suggesting that representing these people somehow compromises American interests, and he even names the firms, giving a target to corporate America."

"A senior U.S. official I spoke to speculates that this information might cause something of scandal, since so much of the pro bono work being done to tilt the playing field infavor of al Qaeda appears to be subsidized by legal fees from the Fortune 500. 'Corporate CEOs seeing this should ask firms to choose between lucrative retainers and representing terrorists' who deliberately target the U.S. economy, he opined.

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"He (Stimson) does approve, he says, of some pro bono work by lawyers. He identifies the "worthwhile" tasks that lawyers can take on, such as work for "homeless people, people who have been abused in domestic violence cases, et cetera." But representing people held without trial for five years is apparently beyond the pale of permissible do-gooding, since the deputy secretary expresses total certainty that there are now no innocent people among the 395 prisoners left on the base.

The assault on the law firms is despicable. I know of not one firm who is being paid to do this work. Who does the DoD think is paying them? Does Osama bin Laden have a bank account dispensing $300 an hour to everyone?

These attorneys do the work because, unlike some, they believe in justice and the rule of law, and are upholding their oaths as lawyers.

Meanwhile, despite the DoD intimation that all these prisoners were responsible for September 11 nobody has yet been formally charged, or allowed a trial. But an academic review by Seton Hall law school of the military's informal allegations demonstrates that with regard to 55% of the prisoners, not even the military contends that they committed a hostile act against the United States.

However, it is the deputy secretary's suggestion that American businesses should be angry because their "bottom line" suffered on account of September 11 that is most perverse. Surely any sane American (and anyone else, for that matter) should more incensed about the 3,000 innocent people who died than some corporations' incidental loss in income.

To suggest that American businesses should fire their legal team because lawyers are standing up for justice is reprehensible, reminiscent of Senator Joe McCarthy's attempt to blacklist many fellow Americans as communists in the 1950s. Perhaps a more appropriate inquiry would be to ask who in the Bush administration authorised these extraordinary DoD comments."