Legal Aid Offer for Detainees Is Retracted
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.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/29/us/nationalspecial3/29gitmo.html?th&emc=th
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