Military Defenders for Detainees Put Tribunals on Trial

WASHINGTON, May 3 — The Bush administration's plan to use military tribunals to try some of the detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which has faced considerable skepticism, has been receiving some of its sharpest attacks from the military defense lawyers who are participating in the process.

Senior government planners once expected that the first of the prisoners to go before a tribunal would plead guilty as part of an agreement to reduce their jail time. But the five military lawyers assigned to defend the first group of prisoners have radically altered that hope, the officials now acknowledge.

The uniformed lawyers have been especially forceful, not only in asserting their clients' innocence but also in denouncing the tribunal system as inherently unfair and rigged.

The Pentagon wants the military commissions, the first for the United States since the end of World War II, to be seen as fair at home and abroad. But the military lawyers, in playing the kind of attack-the-system role that William Kunstler was known for, have become widely quoted around the world and acclaimed by some as heroes after appearances in London and Australia in which they denounced the tribunals.

Nonetheless, senior military officials said that while they disagreed with the view that the tribunal system is unfair, they had no problem with the defense lawyers' making harshly critical comments.

Last month, an audience at Oxford University in England was stunned, witnesses said, when two of the lawyers, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift of the Navy and Maj. Mark Bridges of the Army, said the tribunals were not capable of producing a fair and just result.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/04/politics/04GITM.html