|
Some files require
Adobe Acrobat Reader
Get
FREE reader here
Copyright © 1996-2008
Paul M. Rashkind
All Rights Reserved
| |
 |
Justice
Watch
Miami lawyer quietly reps
Guantanamo detainees
|
|
|
October
08, 2007 |
By:
Julie Kay |
|
ife has changed for assistant federal public
defender Paul Rashkind of Miami since he started representing
two detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
For one thing, he assumes that his phones are bugged and has
learned to ignore the constant “clicks” during
conversations.
He’s also considered somewhat strange in his neighborhood,
where neighbors he never met were interviewed by the FBI during
an extensive background check he underwent to obtain a security
clearance.
But it’s all worth it to Rashkind.
“This is important work,” he said. “When I first started
it, I thought they were all terrorists. When you find out more,
though, you wonder whether any of them are. You have people
turning against each other, people having business disputes.
These are a bunch of people who were scooped up and thrown in
there.”
Rashkind is one of a handful of assistant federal public
defenders around the nation who has volunteered to represent
Guantanamo Bay detainees accused of terrorism and providing
support to terror organizations. He is one of only two assistant
federal public defenders from Florida who volunteered for the
assignment. The other is his son, Noah Rashkind, an assistant
federal public defender in Gainesville and astronomy student who
is representing a Yemeni. Noah Rashkind did not return calls
seeking comment.
Paul Rashkind has represented two detainees — Taj Mohammed, an
Afghan shepherd who was released by U.S. officials in late 2006,
and Bostan Karim, an Afghani Muslim missionary who insists his
sect preaches peace and tolerance and not jihad. While Rashkind
was able to secure the release of Mohammed, Karim is still being
held at Guantanamo.
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the hundreds of detainees at
Guantanamo Bay were entitled to challenge their detentions in
federal courts, U.S. District Judge Thomas H. Hogan, chief judge
in Washington, assigned lawyers from throughout the country to
work on the cases. Aside from Rashkind, several assistant
federal public defenders from New Jersey, the District of
Columbia, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Oregon were assigned cases.
A host of civil lawyers from large firms also volunteered their
time.
Nearly 400 people are detained at the U.S. Naval Base at
Guantanamo Bay as enemy combatants in the Bush
administration’s war on terror. Various lawsuits have been
brought on behalf of the detainees protesting their treatment
and alleged denial of due process. Some have been held since
January 2002.
Representing Mohammed and Karim has been among the most
difficult but rewarding work he has done during his 15 years at
the public defender’s office, Rashkind said.
He has visited Guantanamo about nine times. Traveling there
presents its own challenges. Lawyers must ride in a small plane
with no bathroom for four hours as the plane skirts Cuba to get
to the naval base.
Rashkind, who has learned some words of Pashto, an Afghan
language, still brings an interpreter with him. He’s unsure
whether the cost of the interpreter — $5,000 — comes out of
Federal Public Defender Kathleen Williams’ budget or the
federal court system’s’ budget. But he says Williams has
been supportive of his work.
Once he gets to the camp, conditions do not improve.
Some of the base guards are decent but most are “jerks,”
Rashkind said. “They’re just childish.”
It has been reported that guards, in an effort to get detainees
to distrust their lawyers, have told them the lawyers are all
homosexuals and Jews. Also, Rashkind said, they tell detainees
their lawyers are really U.S. government interrogators.
Additionally, he said it’s common for guards not to tell
detainees that their lawyers have arrived to see them. “I’ll
bump into them later in the day, and they’ll say, ‘They
didn’t tell me you were here,’ ” he said.
So how does he elicit trust in his clients?
“That’s part of the job,” Rashkind said.
He said the civil attorneys who represent detainees “take
great umbrage” at being treated disrespectfully by guards,
while Rashkind and other criminal defense lawyers let the
insults roll off their backs.
Meeting with his clients is unlike what he has experienced in
any other case. Anything brought into the meeting — a piece of
paper, a proposed motion, even a computer — must stay there.
It is turned over to a military guard.
“If you bring in a disc with a proposed motion, you can’t
take your computer back,” Rashkind said. “Some people have
had to leave the hard drives.”
To retrieve the items, Rashkind must fly to Washington and visit
a classified reading room. He must also file a request for
material to be declassified, including his own notes.
Rashkind has purposely taken a low-key approach to his work for
the detainees, eschewing media attention. He suspects the
government retaliates against those who take a more high-profile
attack position or court the media.
For example, Rashkind says he would not undertake the strategy
employed by the federal public defender’s office in Portland,
Ore. Those lawyers decided in January to turn to the Internet to
try to get their client, Adel Hamad, freed from Guantanamo.
An investigator with the Portland public defender’s office
posted an eight-minute video about Hamad and his case on YouTube.
The video includes footage the office took in Afghanistan and
Pakistan of witnesses whom the defense says supports Hamad’s
assertions that he never supported terrorism. It also includes a
statement from investigator William Teesdale filmed in
Guantanamo.
Additionally, three Portland residents also opened a Web site
they created on Hamad to boost awareness of his case. Hamad said
the charities he worked for never supported jihadi causes.
Hamad, held since 2003, is still in detention.
“I don’t think it would help to talk about these cases,”
Rashkind said. “At some level, it’s about personalities.”
Still, intense media interest in Mohammed probably did not hurt
his case, Rashkind acknowledged. The story of Mohammed, dubbed
“the goat herder” and “the shepherd” — how he was
arrested by the U.S. military after he beat up his cousin, a
contractor for the U.S. government — appeared in newspapers
around the country.
Karim, Rashkind’s other client, was arrested at the border
when the minibus he was in was stopped at the Pakistan border.
He was found with a satellite cellphone, $2,700, 3,600 Pakistani
rupees and 70,000 Afghan rupees. His hands were scarred with
what a doctor determined to be burns from explosives.
According to published reports, Karim argued the package with
the phone and money did not belong to him and were given to him
by a friend who was asked to step out of the bus. He said the
scars were caused from a cooking stove when he was a toddler.
Rashkind said his biggest challenge has been obtaining
information about his clients. The government has released
little information about the detainees and why they are being
held. Rashkind spent weeks reading through 10,000 pages obtained
by The Associated Press through a Freedom of Information Act
request, and was able to recognize references to Mohammed,
although he was not named directly. He submitted the information
to the second annual review board and Mohammed, without any
explanation, was sent home.
“It seems who is getting returned is random,” Rashkind said.
|
|
|
|
|
