A professional responsibility crisis no longer looms at Guantánamo--it's here

Richard Kammen

Carol Rosenberg, the Miami Herald's dean-for-life of the Guantánamo press corps, has the story about the latest developments in the military commissions. Excerpt:

A Pentagon shuttle departed for Guantánamo Sunday morning without three civilian lawyers who quit the USS Cole case, setting the stage for a showdown Monday with the military judge who ordered them to the remote U.S. Navy base in Cuba.

Veteran death-penalty defense attorney Rick Kammen and colleagues Rosa Eliades and Mary Spears resigned from the team Oct. 11 over a classified ethical conflict. The judge said, under his reading of the rulebook, they cannot leave the case without his permission.

“The military judge has ordered U.S. citizens to go to what the government claims is a foreign country to provide unethical legal services to keep the façade of justice that is the military commissions running. This order is illegal and neither I nor the other civilians are going to Guantánamo,” Kammen told the Miami Herald Sunday morning. “The fundamental problem, of course, is government misconduct and the judge’s willingness to tolerate this misconduct, which gives rise to the requirement that we withdraw as Mr. [Abd al Rahim] al-Nashiri’s lawyers.”

The underlying circumstances need to be made public if the public is going to have a prayer of understanding what's going on.