CAMPAIGN 2008 | PRESIDENTIAL RACE

Attorneys for Guantánamo captives back Obama's bid

More than 80 attorneys for war-on-terrorism prisoners being held by the U.S. in Cuba said `we are at a critical point in the presidential campaign.'

By CAROL ROSENBERG

crosenberg@MiamiHerald.com

WASHINGTON -- More than 80 attorneys who have been offering free-of-charge legal services to Guantánamo detainees issued a statement Monday supporting Democrat Barack Obama's presidential bid.

''We are at a critical point in the presidential campaign, and as lawyers who have been deeply involved in the Guantánamo litigation to preserve the important right to habeas corpus, we are writing to urge you to support Senator Obama,'' the lawyers said in an open letter dated Monday.

Lawyers signing it included partners from major U.S. law firms and small-town practitioners as well as Michael Ratner, whose New York Center for Constitutional Rights has for years coordinated legal efforts to provide representation to each of the men held without charge at the offshore prison compound in southeast Cuba.

In 2006, Congress stripped the Guantánamo captives of the traditional right to file writs of habeas corpus in U.S. district court to challenge their detention -- and instead offered detainees more limited appeals in federal courts.

The U.S. Supreme Court is now reviewing the constitutionality of that law.

POLITICAL ISSUE

Guantánamo has not been a major theme of the presidential campaign, but mainstream candidates on both sides -- notably former Vietnam POW John McCain, the Republican senator -- have said they would move to close the prison camps because they have stirred anti-American anger across the globe.

Obama has gone further than many. In a November, he pledged to both close the prison camps and ''restore habeas corpus,'' a position that Democratic rival John Edwards has also staked out.

Hillary Clinton, likewise, has said from the U.S. Senate that she favors closure. But she has not prominently included pledges to do it in her campaign speeches.

Republican candidate Mitt Romney, in contrast, has advocated doubling the detention center -- which today holds about 275 foreign men as enemy combatants and cell space for more than 1,500.

The Pentagon calls the war-on-terrorism compound a post-9/11 necessity and says captives there are held humanely, many of whom can go before military boards to argue they are no threat to the United States and should be set free.

THOSE WHO SIGNED

Lawyers signing the letter included East Coast law school professors, who have visited the U.S. Navy base to defend individual detainees, as well as corporate lawyers for Saudi, Kuwaiti, and Yemeni detainees. None of the lawyers who signed the letter are from Florida.

Also among the signers are Wells Dixon and Gitanjali Gutierrez, the only lawyers so far to meet with a formerly CIA-held ''high-value detainee.'' Last year, they met with Baltimore-educated captive Majid Khan in a special segregated section of the prison camps. They accuse the U.S. government of subjecting their client to a program of state-sponsored torture.

The CIA says it doesn't engage in torture.

Others who signed the letter included a former federal judge, John Gibbons of Newark, N.J., who successfully argued the first Guantánamo detainee case before the U.S. Supreme Court, Rasul v. Bush, and a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, Donald Guter, who likewise argued against Bush policy.