They Hate Our Freedoms

Clive Stafford Smith on a new approach to the U.S. government's defence of Guantánamo Bay internment camp.

The ink was barely dry on all the criticisms issued on the five-year anniversary of Guantánamo Bay before the US department of defence began its desperate riposte. On the day of the anniversary, January 11 2007, Cully Stimson, a "deputy assistant secretary of defence for detainee affairs" went on Federal News Radio to launch an assault on the law firms who represent the prisoners. (You can listen to his interview here.)

The deputy secretary, a lawyer with the department of defence (DoD), knows "the news story that you're really going to start seeing in the next couple of weeks" about Guantánamo Bay. A freedom of information request has, he says, elicited the names of the lawyers representing the prisoners.

"And you know what?" he asks rhetorically. "It's shocking." He goes on to list a Who's Who of the American legal profession, which he obviously had prepared to read out on the radio programme. I could name many others.

He suggests that this information should be passed along to the CEOs of American businesses who currently employ these firms, because the lawyers "are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001." He thinks that those CEOs should "make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms." This scandalous story, he says, "is going to have major play" in the media.

Read more. If anything, it gets worse.

(I've changed the link to the interview to a more useful one that that used in the original article. The link I used is from this page on Federal Radio News)