At salon.com, Glenn Greenwald triumphantly defends the lawyers who have been working with detainees at Guantanamo Bay from attacks by Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney. A podcast with Jonathan Hafetz, the editor of The Guantanamo Lawyers, is at the bottom of the article.
But that disgusting duo is also smearing countless civilian lawyers whose work since 9/11 has been nothing short of heroic: representing the most demonized and despised group of individuals, and devoting massive amounts of time, energy and resources to doing so, almost always for free and — particularly in the early aftermath of 9/11 — at substantial risk to their reputations and professional relationships. They did so to defend the most basic Constitutional liberties of all of us — as Lt. Col. David Frakt told Serwer: “What we have seen over and over and over is that the vast majority of detainees at Guantanamo are innocent” — and there are no words in the English language sufficient to describe how low and odious are the people responsible for this “Department of Jihad/Al Qaeda 7” campaign.
As it turns out, one of the lawyers who has successfully represented Guantanamo detainees, Jonathan Hafetz of the ACLU, co-edited a newly released book, The Guantánamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison, Outside the Law, which documents the sacrifices made and the indispensable value of those who have fought against the system of lawlessness and brutality represented by Guantanamo. Hafetz himself represented Mohamed Jawad, a boy no older than 15 at the time he was detained in Afghanistan and shipped to Guantanamo, falsely accused of throwing a grenade at American soldiers who had invaded his country, and put in a cage for 7 years with no trial (where he twice tried to commit suicide), until finally being released last year after a federal judge granted his habeas petition on the ground of insufficient evidence.
