Potshot at Guantanamo lawyers backfires
Big firms laud free legal aid for detainees
WASHINGTON -- Two weeks after a senior Pentagon official suggested that corporations should pressure their law firms to stop assisting detainees at Guantanamo Bay, major companies have turned the tables on the Pentagon and issued statements supporting the law firms' work on behalf of terrorism suspects.
The corporate support for the lawyers comes as law associations and members of Congress have expressed outrage at the remarks of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs Charles D. "Cully" Stimson on Jan. 11.
In a radio interview, Stimson stated the names of a dozen law firms that volunteer their services to represent detainees, and he suggested that the chief executives of the firms' corporate clients would make the lawyers "choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms."
He said he expected the newly public list of law firms that do work at Guantanamo Bay to spark a cycle of negative publicity for them. Instead, Stimson himself became the center of nationwide criticism and later apologized for the remarks.
The episode has become an embarrassing chapter in the Pentagon's long-running battle with the detainees' lawyers and appears to have spurred public support for the legal rights of the detainees, nearly 400 of whom just marked the start of their sixth year of incarceration at the base.
Charles Rudnick , a spokesman for
Brackett Denniston, senior vice president and general counsel of
The lawyers have welcomed these expressions of solidarity from their paying clients.
"It would seem [the Pentagon] made a miscalculation," said Stephen Oleskey , an attorney at WilmerHale in Boston who has traveled to Guantanamo Bay seven times since he took up the case in 2004. "We haven't had any clients call up and say, 'We are really deeply disturbed that you are advocating for fair hearings.' The amount of support [we have gotten] has been heartening."
He said a committee at WilmerHale swiftly made the decision in 2004 to offer free help to the detainees when a request went out from the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based nonprofit legal organization, which had filed a petition in federal court on behalf of the detainees.
"As time has gone on, it has become plainer that it is an important issue for our justice system," Oleskey said. "People have been more and more interested in hearing about it. We have been asked to speak at universities, human rights groups, and churches."
Michael Ratner , president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said that in his early days of defending Guantanamo detainees he got hundreds of hate letters from the public every time he spoke about the issue on television. But now, he said, he receives only positive feedback, especially since Stimson's remarks.
"They miscalculated, that's for sure," said Ratner, who helps coordinate 500 lawyers and 120 law firms across the country to defend the detainees.
Support for the defense of Guantanamo detainees has become so widely accepted that two Newton attorneys are defraying the cost of their trips to Guantanamo Bay by collecting donations from the public.
Doris Tennant and Ellen Lubell have collected $7,000 in the past three weeks toward the estimated $20,000 they expect to spend defending an Algerian detainee known as Number 744. It is difficult to tell whether the controversy has made fund-raising easier, Tennant said, because Stimson's remarks coincided with their appeal for funds. But she said many of her supporters made reference to Stimson as they voiced their support and sent in checks.
"It has been quite an outpouring," said Tennant, who hopes to make her first visit to Guantanamo Bay next week.
That support is not what Stimson predicted when he gave a radio interview Jan. 11, the fifth anniversary of the day the detainees were brought to the base.
Stimson told the Washington-based Federal News Radio that the cause of detainees was "not popular" with the American people and that the list of major law firms representing the detainees was "shocking."
"I think quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hurt their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms," he said.
In the interview, he named about a dozen firms, including WilmerHale. He said that corporations would become outraged when they realized that their legal fees were subsidizing this kind of pro bono work.
In addition to the interview, a Wall Street Journal columnist quoted an unnamed US official making similar remarks in a column that also included the names of several top firms.
Now, some lawyers for detainees are accusing the Pentagon of an organized effort to generate bad publicity for the firms.
Baltimore-based lawyer William J. Murphy , who represents a Kuwaiti detainee, has filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking records of communications between senior Pentagon officials and the media before the Jan. 11 interview in a bid to uncover evidence of a smear campaign.
Some lawyers said publicizing the names of the law firms had achieved one of Stimson's objectives -- distracting attention from the roughly 395 men who remain imprisoned.
"It backfired to the extent that they didn't get the kind of support that they were hoping," said Neil McGaraghan , a Boston-based attorney at Bingham McCutchen, which represents a group of ethnic Uighurs from China at Guantanamo Bay.
"But to the extent that it has drawn attention away from Guantanamo and focused it on the lawyers, it has worked." 