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Detainee Lawyers Win Recognition
Three Guantánamo lawyers were picked for a prestigious list of the nation's top 100 attorneys. They are a Navy officer, a New York civil libertarian and a retired judge, all defenders of the detainees.
CAROL ROSENBERG
The Miami Herald
June 23, 2006
With the U.S. Supreme Court soon to decide the fate of the Guantánamo war court, the prestigious National Law Journal has included three key litigators in the captives' legal challenges among America's 100 most influential lawyers.
''I'm flattered. I think that it's the case, not the attorney,'' said Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, 44, a career Navy officer and defense attorney for Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni captive who is challenging his detention in U.S. courts.
The high court is expected to rule by next week on the legitimacy of President Bush's military commissions, in a challenge on Hamdan's behalf.
The journal described Swift's Supreme Court challenge, argued by Georgetown law professor Neal Katyal, as ``a case that will determine whether the Geneva Conventions are enforceable in federal court through habeas corpus petitions.''
It also noted that, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Swift declared that the formula for the current commissions ``abandoned the rule of law.''
Swift made the list of 100 while at the remote base in southeast Cuba, attempting to meet with his client after the apparent suicide by hanging of three Arab captives on June 10.
But the 36-year-old Yemeni with a fourth-grade education refused the meeting, Swift said, because ``they interrogated him without me there -- about the suicides -- and that freaks him out.''
The list, published Monday and the Journal's first since 2000, included prominent litigators on behalf of both George W. Bush and Al Gore in the 2000 election recount showdown, Harvard and Stanford constitutional law scholars and former solicitors general from the Bush and Clinton administrations.
It also listed Michael Ratner, 66, president of the New YorkCenter for Constitutional Rights, which has championed Guantánamo detainees' habeas corpus petitions.
The Journal said Ratner's group ``was among the first to bring suits after Sept. 11, 2001, on behalf of alleged terrorists imprisoned in the U.S. Naval Station in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; has opposed the Bush administration's use of executive power in the war on terrorism and the National Security Agency's domestic spying program.''
Also on the list was attorney John J. Gibbons, 81, a retired federal judge who argued the first Guantánamo captive case before the Supreme Court -- Rasul v. Bush -- which won detainees the right to sue for their freedom and see lawyers.
Journal editor-in-chief Rex Bossert said the confluence of Guantánamo attorneys among the 100 was ``probably more of a coincidence than anything else, and perhaps not surprising because the most influential lawyers tend to work on the most high-profile cases.''
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