Justice: Respected Marine Lawyer Alleges Military Injustices

A long profile by Daniel Zwerdling of Colby Vokey, the Marine Corps' top defense attorney, "pulled out of his position because he's doing too good a job....the people in Washington, D.C., don't like that." (NPR, 2007-10-30)

War on Terror: Gitmo JAG attacks legal process

Have you noticed how often we must rely on the BBC, The Guardian, The Economist, The Independent UK, foreign language papers, and, domestically, the McClatchy chain to do the reporting not being done by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the "news" magazines, let alone the networks and CNN? As of this posting, this story from the Independent's Sunday edition had been picked up by dozens of blogs and a few alternative media sites, but not by a single major American media outlet. - JG

Guantanamo military lawyer breaks ranks to condemn 'unconscionable' detention

by Leonard Doyle in Washington (The Independent UK, 2007-1027)

An American military lawyer and veteran of dozens of secret Guantanamo tribunals has made a devastating attack on the legal process for determining whether Guantanamo prisoners are "enemy combatants".

The whistleblower, an army major inside the military court system which the United States has established at Guantanamo Bay, has described the detention of one prisoner, a hospital administrator from Sudan, as "unconscionable".

His critique will be the centrepiece of a hearing on 5 December before the US Supreme Court when another attempt is made to shut the prison down. So nervous is the Bush administration of the latest attack – and another Supreme Court ruling against it – that it is preparing a whole new system of military courts to deal with those still imprisoned.

The rest of the story: The Independent UK

Interest growing in plight of journalist held at Gitmo

Why have detainees been held at Guantánamo for six years without a mechanism to fairly determine whether they belong there?

From Prisoner 345: What happened to Al Jazeera’s Sami al-Haj in the July/August 2007 edition of the Columbia Journalism Review:

"Despite the novelty of [Sami] al-Haj’s status as the only journalist inside Guantánamo, it was a long time before he attracted much media attention. At first, even Al Jazeera was reluctant to cover his story. 'Up until around 2003, the air was very tense. You didn’t really want to investigate it too much,' said Ahmad Ibrahim, an Al Jazeera producer who has researched al-Haj’s case. 'At least to a lot of people around the world, holding people was probably justifiable due to the enormity of 9/11. And in the Arab world, the situation at Guantánamo was difficult to comprehend or believe, even that any kind of torture would be perpetrated by the U.S. A lot of people didn’t comprehend what Guantánamo stood for, and the legal arguments that were used to justify it.' In 2005, Ibrahim invited Stafford Smith to Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha. 'That’s when the big interest in Sami and his plight started.'

"Since then, al-Haj has become a cause célèbre in the Arab world. Ibrahim made a forty-five-minute documentary about him, Prisoner 345, and Al Jazeera regularly reports on his case. Al-Haj has also been featured in several stories in the British press. But despite repeated efforts by Ibrahim and Stafford Smith, there was until very recently almost no coverage of al-Haj in the U.S., apart from a New York Times column last October by Nicholas Kristof. Al Jazeera 'is still perceived in a very negative way' in the U.S., said Joel Campagna of the Committee to Protect Journalists. 'I think that has made people pause when looking at this case.'

"But while some journalists may distrust Al Jazeera, or may have believed Donald Rumsfeld’s discredited claim that the inmates represented the 'worst of the worst,' others may have avoided writing about detainees like al-Haj because of a more mundane bias: the simple difficulty of reporting about Guantánamo. It’s often been noted that the lopsided legal process fashioned by the Bush administration makes it virtually impossible for detainees to defend themselves. A lesser noticed consequence is that the withholding of evidence makes it impossible for journalists to write a conventionally 'balanced' story about individual detainees—and hence, they are less likely to write about them at all. While researching this piece, for instance, I’ve had plenty of access to al-Haj’s lawyer and to Al Jazeera, but none to the Department of Defense or al-Haj himself. This imbalance is uncomfortable, but to be deterred by it would be to miss the point. The central question underlying the case of al-Haj and the other detainees is not their guilt or innocence, but why they have been held at Guantánamo for six years without a mechanism to fairly determine whether they belong there."

The rest of the story: The Columbia Journalism Review