Legal defense groups Tuesday accused the Pentagon of foot-dragging on security clearances that would let civilian lawyers help their military counterparts defend the alleged plotters of the Sept. 11 attacks at Guantánamo.
On Friday, a Bush administration official overseeing military commissions approved death penalty charges against five alleged al Qaeda terrorists, setting the stage for arraignment in June.
Chief among them is Khalid Sheik Mohammed, known as KSM, the alleged al Qaeda mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed 2,973 people.
He has been assigned a Pentagon defense lawyer, Navy Reserves Capt. Prescott Prince of Richmond, Va.
But two experienced Boise, Idaho, attorneys with federal terrorism trial experience -- David Nevin and Scott McKay -- have yet to receive the necessary Pentagon permits clearances to work with Prince at Guantánamo.
In fact, not one of eight lawyers who had applied for clearances in recent months had been pre-approved and briefed on the security program, said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
A week ago, Romero wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates in protest. He noted that, as the cases progressed, it appeared that Nevin and McKay might not even meet KSM before arraignment.
''We can both imagine that some critics would say that the backlog of pending paperwork at the Department of Defense was yet another way to ensure an unfair proceeding,'' Romero wrote.
Gates had not replied as of Tuesday evening.
But Joseph DellaVedova, a spokesman at the Pentagon's Office of Military Commissions, said work was moving apace so that lawyers might get clearances.
''We have been notified by the defense of various counsel wishing to represent certain high-value detainees,'' he said. ``Their requests for clearances are at various stages of the approval process and we track the process carefully.''
He said three civilian lawyers had ''completed the security process'' required to work with high-value detainees at the Sept. 11 conspiracy trials. But he declined to identify them, or elaborate.
Civil liberties lawyers are offering services free of charge to KSM -- who faces the death penalty, if convicted -- under a specially funded ''John Adams Project'' organized by the ACLU and National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
In addition to Nevin and McKay, the ACLU has also assigned noted San Francisco death penalty attorney Gary Sowards to the KSM case. Sowards has extensive national security defense experience and also helped prepare an insanity defense for the so-called ''Unabomber,'' Theodore Kaczynski.
So far, the ACLU and NACDL have assigned up to two civilian lawyers to each of the five alleged 9/11 conspirators, four to work with Prince on KSM, whom the CIA confirms it waterboarded in secret overseas custody.
Each has two military defense lawyers as well.
The NACDL issued a statement of protest on Tuesday, saying that the lawyers' clearances were ``entangled in bureaucratic red tape.''
Because the ''high-value'' accused were held for years secretly by the CIA, the military considers all contact with them classified top secret.
That includes conversations between KSM and his lawyers, or between lawyers and any of the alleged senior al Qaeda men who are currently at a secluded prison camp at Guantánamo.
