Official Attacks Top Law Firms Over Detainees - New York Times
The New York Times

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January 13, 2007
Official Attacks Top Law Firms Over Detainees
By
NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 - The senior Pentagon official in charge of military
detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was
dismayed
that lawyers at many of the nation's top firms were representing prisoners
at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms' corporate clients should
consider
ending their business ties.

The comments by Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of
defense for detainee affairs, produced an instant torrent of anger from
lawyers, legal
ethics specialists and bar association officials, who said Friday that his
comments were repellent and displayed an ignorance of the duties of lawyers
to represent people in legal trouble.

"This is prejudicial to the administration of justice," said Stephen
Gillers, a law professor at
New York University
and an authority on legal ethics. "It's possible that lawyers willing to
undertake what has been long viewed as an admirable chore will decline to do
so
for fear of antagonizing important clients.

"We have a senior government official suggesting that representing these
people somehow compromises American interests, and he even names the firms,
giving
a target to corporate America."

Mr. Stimson made his remarks in an interview on Thursday with Federal News
Radio, a local Washington-based station that is aimed at an audience of
government
employees.

The same point appeared Friday on the editorial page of The Wall Street
Journal, where Robert L. Pollock, a member of the newspaper's editorial
board, cited
the list of law firms and quoted an unnamed "senior U.S. official" as
saying, "Corporate C.E.O.'s seeing this should ask firms to choose between
lucrative
retainers and representing terrorists."

In his radio interview, Mr. Stimson said: "I think the news story that you're
really going to start seeing in the next couple of weeks is this: As a
result
of a FOIA request through a major news organization, somebody asked, 'Who
are the lawyers around this country representing detainees down there?' and
you
know what, it's shocking." The F.O.I.A. reference was to a Freedom of
Information Act request submitted by Monica Crowley, a conservative
syndicated talk
show host, asking for the names of all the lawyers and law firms
representing Guantánamo detainees in federal court cases.

Mr. Stimson, who is himself a lawyer, then went on to name more than a dozen
of the firms listed on the 14-page report provided to Ms. Crowley,
describing
them as "the major law firms in this country." He said, "I think, quite
honestly, when corporate C.E.O.'s see that those firms are representing the
very
terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.'s are going
to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or
representing
reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next
few weeks. And we want to watch that play out."

Karen J. Mathis, a Denver lawyer who is president of the
American Bar Association
, said: "Lawyers represent people in criminal cases to fulfill a core
American value: the treatment of all people equally before the law. To
impugn those
who are doing this critical work - and doing it on a volunteer basis - is
deeply offensive to members of the legal profession, and we hope to all
Americans."

In an interview on Friday, Attorney General
Alberto R. Gonzales
said he had no problem with the current system of representation. "Good
lawyers representing the detainees is the best way to ensure that justice is
done
in these cases," he said.

Neither the White House nor the Pentagon had any official comment, but
officials sought to distance themselves from Mr. Stimson's view. His
comments "do
not represent the views of the Defense Department or the thinking of its
leadership," a senior Pentagon official said. He would not allow his name to
be
used, seemingly to lessen the force of his rebuke. Mr. Stimson did not
return a call on Friday seeking comment.

The role of major law firms agreeing to take on the cases of Guantánamo
prisoners challenging their detentions in federal courts has hardly been a
secret
and has been the subject of many news articles that have generally cast
their efforts in a favorable light. Michael Ratner, who heads the Center for
Constitutional
Rights, a New York-based human rights group that is coordinating the legal
representation for the Guantánamo detainees, said about 500 lawyers from
about
120 law firms had volunteered their services to represent Guantánamo
prisoners.

When asked in the radio interview who was paying for the legal
representation, Mr. Stimson replied: "It's not clear, is it? Some will
maintain that they
are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, that they're doing it pro
bono, and I suspect they are; others are receiving moneys from who knows
where,
and I'd be curious to have them explain that."

Lawyers expressed outrage at that, asserting that they are not being paid
and that Mr. Stimson had tried to suggest they were by innuendo. Of the
approximately
500 lawyers coordinated by the Center for Constitutional Rights, no one is
being paid, Mr. Ratner said. One Washington law firm, Shearman & Sterling,
which
has represented Kuwaiti detainees, has received money from the families of
the prisoners, but Thomas Wilner, a lawyer there, said they had donated all
of it to charities related to the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Mr.
Ratner said that there were two other defense lawyers not under his group's
umbrella
and that he did not know whether they were paid.

Christopher Moore, a lawyer at the New York firm Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen &
Hamilton who represented an Uzbeki detainee who has since been released,
said:
"We believe in the concept of justice and that every person is entitled to
counsel. Any suggestion that our representation was anything other than a
pro
bono basis is untrue and unprofessional." Mr. Moore said he had made four
trips to Guantánamo and one to Albania at the firm's expense, to see his
client
freed.

Senator
Patrick J. Leahy
, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, wrote to
President Bush on Friday asking him to disavow Mr. Stimson's remarks.

Mr. Stimson, who was a Navy lawyer, graduated from George Mason University
Law School. In a 2006 interview with the magazine of Kenyon College, his
alma
mater, Mr. Stimson said that he was learning "to choose my words carefully
because I am a public figure on a very, very controversial topic."

Copyright 2007
The New York Times Company

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