Key Guantanamo Detainees to Get Access to Lawyers: Report

Source: Agence France-Presse

Key Guantanamo detainees to get access to lawyers: Report

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Fourteen detainees at the US base at Guantanamo Bay -- including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 terror strikes -- have reportedly been formally offered the right to request attorneys.

The development "could allow them to join other detainees in challenging their status as enemy combatants in a US appellate court," the Washington Post said.

The 14 "have not had access to lawyers during their year at Guantanamo Bay or while they were held, for varying lengths of time, at the secret CIA sites abroad. They were entitled to military 'personal representatives' to assist them during the administrative process that determined whether they are enemy combatants," the report added.

The United States had sought special rules for the key detainees' access to attorneys, arguing in court papers "that attorney-client conversations could reveal classified elements of the CIA's secret detention program and its controversial interrogation tactics." The "high-value" detainees received legal representation request forms in the last week of August and first week of September, the report said.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070928/ts_alt_afp/usattacksguantanamojustice_070928123854

Does anyone ever think about what they are saying officially anymore?

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.” ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/29/us/nationalspecial3/29gitmo.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin