That's what it comes down to. It angers me to no end that Washington has listened to their own spin so much and for so long that they no longer appear aware that we have a criminal justice system in place to protect all of us, and that when it no longer does that, it protects none of us.
Note that Stimson has acted a judge and jury and ALREADY convicted these detainees as "terrorists."
A senior Pentagon official responsible for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said he finds it "shocking" that top US attorneys are rushing to defend "terrorists" locked up there.
"The major law firms in the country ... are out there representing detainees," Cully Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, said in a Federal News Radio interview Thursday, available online.
"And you know what, it's shocking," he said.
"I think quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms."
His remarks were blasted on Friday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and in a Washington Post editorial, described as an attack on the role of lawyers and the rule of law.
"What Mr. Stimson condemns are precisely the values we should be trying to defend in the war on terror," the ACLU said in a statement.
According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is coordinating the legal defense of detainees, more than 450 civil rights lawyers volunteered to defend the prisoners.
Only 10 of 395 Guantanamo detainees face charges and have been assigned a military defense lawyer to represent them. Washington hopes to prosecute 60 to 80 before military tribunals, while another 86 more could soon be repatriated.
The US government has meanwhile reserved the right to keep the remaining 230 in jail indefinitely and without charges.
TPM has more here. Guess who instigated this little outburst?
