SIX YEARS ago next month, the first prisoners from the war against terrorism arrived at the US military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The administration has refused to grant prisoner-of-war status to inmates there and denied them the protections of the Geneva Conventions, but has brought criminal charges against just three of them. Those remaining face indefinite imprisonment. In this ignoble chapter in the history of US justice, the military's own uniformed lawyers have stood out for their attempts to uphold the rule of law.
That may not be true for long. To clip the wings of the Judge Advocate General corps, the administration recently proposed, as the Globe's Charlie Savage reported, to give politically appointed lawyers a veto over JAG officers' promotions. When military lawyers objected to this gambit, the administration backed off. But it is still looking for a way to expand its authority over JAG lawyers.
Congress should block any move by the Bush administration to do for JAG what former attorney general Alberto Gonzales did to nine US attorneys fired for political reasons.
Under the rejected proposal, any JAG promotion would not have been based just on the merits of the officer's work; such a move would also have required "coordination" with civilian Defense Department lawyers.
This attempted power grab came after JAG officers testified last year against the administration proposal, enacted by Congress, for kangaroo-court tribunal procedures for Guantanamo inmates charged with crimes. JAG lawyers called for trying the prisoners either under the military's respected court martial rules or in federal courts.
The JAG lawyers were trying to uphold Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. It stipulates that both prisoners of war and captured combatants not granted that status can be tried only under judicial guarantees "recognized as indispensable by all civilized peoples." The 2006 law passed by Congress violates the article by denying defendants their habeas corpus right to challenge their detention in court and by permitting the use of evidence resulting from abusive interrogation procedures. In the past, JAG lawyers have also spoken out against the use of torture in interrogation.
The administration is likely to defend its effort to bring JAG lawyers into line with administration policies as a traditional exercise of civilian authority over the military. But civilian authority does not mean that presidential appointees with an agenda should have free rein over professional, nonpartisan service members. If the country is going to have a corps of high-quality uniformed attorneys in its armed services, Congress should kill any proposals for politicizing the JAG lawyers.
