Posted on Wed, Jul. 09, 2008

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- When U.S. law groups announced in April that they were hiring the nation's top criminal defense lawyers to defend alleged al Qaeda terrorists at the war court here, one executive called the lawyers ``The A Team.''

Now, they're the No-Pay Team.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has pledged to cover costs of civilian lawyers defending alleged arch-terrorists, is in a struggle with the U.S. Treasury Department over a permit to pay $250-an-hour fees and other expenses to attorneys who have been shuttling to this remote U.S. Navy base from as far as Boise, Idaho.

The Treasury division, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, is the same unit that polices American citizens' travel to Cuba. Its authority to license defense costs at the war courts here, called military commissions, comes from anti-terror legislation.

Tuesday, ACLU director Anthony Romero accused the Bush administration of foot-dragging, noting civilian defense lawyers were slow to receive security clearances to meet accused terrorists held for years without access to attorneys. ACLU says it has budgeted more than $8.5 million to defend the detainees.

'Now the government is stonewalling again by not allowing Americans' private dollars to be paid to American lawyers to defend civil liberties,'' he said.

He called the slow licensing an ''obstruction of justice'' at a time when ``the Bush administration insists on moving ahead with the prosecutions.''

At the Treasury Department, spokesman John Rankin declined to comment on the showdown with the ACLU, citing privacy policies.

But he said the licensing division ``is treating this request with the seriousness it deserves and strives to process license applications as expeditiously as possible.''

The program is called the John Adams Project, sponsored by the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

DEFENSE PAY

Under it, attorneys will be paid for travel, expenses, research and copying as well as $250 an hour to defend men described by President Bush as ''the worst of the worst'' now facing death penalty prosecutions at the war court.

Top criminal defense lawyers typically charge at least $550 an hour.

At its inception, the legal team got prestigious endorsements from such wide-ranging lawyers as former Attorney General Janet Reno and former FBI Director William Webster. Romero boasted he was assembling the A Team, the cream of American criminal defense attorneys who had earlier helped alleged terrorists, foreign and domestic.

Participants include Boise lawyers David Nevin and Scott McKay, who are Pentagon defense consultants to alleged 9/11 architect Khalid Sheik Mohammed, 43; Seattle attorneys Jeff Robinson and Amanda Lee, defending Mohammed's nephew, Ammar al Baluchi, 30, who noted at his June 5 arraignment that he is a Microsoft certified computer engineer; and Chicago lawyer Tom Durkin, defending Ramzi bin al Shibh, accused of organizing some of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

Nevin said he was surprised at the standoff, especially since the ACLU had long been ``in the business of defending people's rights.''

''Obviously, everyone is going to do whatever is required to be done. But, intuitively, it seems odd to me that anyone's permission is necessary,'' he said.

Pentagon prosecutors accuse the five captives of conspiring to carry out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed 2,987 people, and are seeking to execute them if convicted.

The ACLU and NACDL unveiled the program in early April amid protests by U.S. military defense lawyers that the Pentagon had not provided their offices with sufficient resources.

The Treasury Department's Rankin this week offered no timetable for when the licenses might be issued.

''OFAC processes thousands of license requests each year for a variety of sanctions programs and consults with other offices and leadership in the U.S. Treasury and other agencies as the circumstances merit,'' he said.

Rankin noted, however, that the authority to try to stop funds from going to terror groups is different than the embargo on Cuba, which was created decades ago to isolate a communist regime that offers no due process.

TERRORIST LIST

At issue in this case is that the Bush administration had earlier put Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind known as KSM, and the other four accused on a list of ``Specially Designated Global Terrorists.''

Lawyers awaiting reimbursement from the ACLU arrived at the base Monday for this week's hearings -- the second court appearance of the 9/11 accused. At their June 5 arraignment, all five rejected the authority of the war court and refused their Pentagon-appointed attorneys.

Starting Wednesday afternoon, the military judge, Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann, will question each alleged terrorist separately, out of earshot of the others, on whether he wants to act as his own attorney -- and to perhaps define what role, if any, the U.S. military and civilian lawyers offering their services might have.

Also at issue is whether bin al Shibh is mentally competent enough to stand trial. Military medical staff have him on psychotropic drugs at the prison camps here, but war court staff have censored the cocktail of five drugs from public disclosure, citing U.S. medical privacy rights.