Interesting article in The Guardian newspaper today.

US fires Guantanamo defence team
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1098618,00.html
James Meek
Wednesday December 3, 2003
The Guardian

A team of military lawyers recruited to defend alleged terrorists held by the US
at Guantanamo Bay was dismissed by the Pentagon after some of its members
rebelled against the unfair way the trials have been designed, the Guardian has
learned.

And some members of the new legal defence team remain deeply unhappy with the
trials - known as "military commissions" - believing them to be slanted towards
the prosecution and an affront to modern US military justice.

Of the more than 600 detainees at the US prison camp at Guantanamo, none has
been charged with any crime, and none has had access to a lawyer, although some
have been in captivity of one kind or another for two years.

But the US has repeatedly promised that at least some of the prisoners will be
charged and tried by military commissions, an arcane form of tribunal based on
long-disused models from the 1940s.

When charged, a prisoner will be assigned a uniformed military defence lawyer.
The prisoners have a theoretical right to a civilian lawyer, but the US has
placed financial and bureaucratic obstacles in the way of this.

A former military lawyer with good contacts in the US military legal
establishment said that the first group of defence lawyers the Pentagon
recruited for Guantanamo balked at the commission rules, which insist, among
other restrictions, that the government be allowed to listen in to any
conversations between attorney and client.

"There was a circular that went out to military lawyers in the early spring of
2003 which said 'we are looking for volunteers' for defence counsel," said the
ex-military lawyer. "There was a selection process, and the people they selected
were the right people, they had the right credentials, they were good lawyers.

"The first day, when they were being briefed on the dos and don'ts, at least a
couple said: 'You can't impose these restrictions on us because we can't
properly represent our clients.'

"When the group decided they weren't going to go along, they were relieved. They
reported in the morning and got fired that afternoon."

The Pentagon's recently set up Office of Military Commissions denied the claim.
"That is not true, never happened," said its spokesman, Major John Smith. "The
military commission is a tool of justice. I expect some of these individuals [on
Guantanamo] will plead not guilty, and will be represented zealously by their
lawyers."

Yet the Guardian understands from a uniformed source with intimate knowledge of
the mood among the current military defence team, six lawyers strong, that there
is deep unhappiness about the commission set-up.

"It's like you took military justice, gave it to a prosecutor and said, 'modify
it any way you want'," the source said. "The government would like to say we
have done these commissions before. But what happened after [the Nazi cases] was
the military justice system changed. What we have done is stupid. It is, I would
say, an insult to the military, to the evolution of the military justice system.
They want to take us back to 1942."

Two Britons, Moazzam Begg and Feroz Abassi, are among the Guantanamo prisoners
that President George Bush has "designated" for trial. The military defence
lawyers in Washington are still waiting for permission to fly to Guantanamo.

In an investigation into the Guantanamo prison camp, the Guardian has also
learned that a number of prisoners, thought to be between two and five, are kept
permanently isolated in a super-secure facility within the main prison camp at
Guantanamo, Camp Delta.