Center for Constitutional Rights
The Center for Constitutional RightsThe Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) is a has coordinated efforts by
American
American(s) may refer to:
* American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America"
** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America
** American ancestry, pe ...
lawyers to handle the
habeas corpus
''Habeas corpus'' (; from Medieval Latin, ) is a recourse in law through which a person can report an unlawful detention or imprisonment to a court and request that the court order the custodian of the person, usually a prison official, ...
, and other legal appeals, of several hundred of the Guantanamodetainees.
Only American lawyers have been allowed to visit detainees at the
Guantanamo Bay detention camp
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp ( es, Centro de detención de la bahía de Guantánamo) is a United States military prison located within Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, also referred to as Guantánamo, GTMO, and Gitmo (), on the coast of Gua ...
s, in
Cuba
Cuba ( , ), officially the Republic of Cuba ( es, República de Cuba, links=no ), is an island country comprising the island of Cuba, as well as Isla de la Juventud and several minor archipelagos. Cuba is located where the northern Caribb ...
. They have to go through security screening first. And they must agree that they can't speak from the notes they took during their meetings with their clients until they have been cleared for release.
Complaints from the detainees' attorneys
* Many of the lawyers have repeated claims that their clients have been abused, and are receiving inhumane treatment.
* Lawyers have reported that it was hard to establish trust with their clients, because:
** Guantanamo guards had warned them that the lawyers were either
Jews
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
or homosexuals.
** Guantanamo interrogators had previously used the interrogation technique "
false flag
A false flag operation is an act committed with the intent of disguising the actual source of responsibility and pinning blame on another party. The term "false flag" originated in the 16th century as an expression meaning an intentional misr ...
", and represented themselves as their lawyers, in attempts to get the captives to divulge information they had withheld during their interrogations.
* Lawyers reported that the DoD had interfered with their ability to meet with their clients, telling them that they weren't spelling their names correctly.
* Lawyers reported that the DoD interfered with their ability to meet with their clients by both refusing to provide a government translator, and raising bogus national security concerns about the translators they proposed.
* The body that reviewed their notes, before they were able to consult them, was arbitrarily classifying their notes, so they couldn't consult them. Omar Khadr's lawyer Muneer Ahmad found, on his first visit to the secure centre which is the only place where the lawyers can review their notes, that almost the entire twenty pages of notes he took when he first met Khadr had been classified above his level of security clearance.
However, an Army investigation found these charges unfounded.
US Department of Defense
The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national sec ...
spokesmen state “It is our policy to in no way interfere with legal counsel.”
The Department of Defense maintains that "they see evidence of the al Qaeda-directed misinformation campaign in allegations of detainee abuse and mishandling of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay."
Allen & Overy
Allen & Overy LLP (informally A&O) is an international law firm. The firm has 580 partners and over 5,600 people worldwide. In 2022 A&O reported an increase in revenue to GBP1.96 billion and is the second largest law firm headquartered in t ...
Bingham McCutchen
Bingham McCutchen LLP was a global law firm with approximately 850 attorneys in nine US offices and five international offices. It ceased operations in late 2014, when several hundred of its partners and associate lawyers left the firm to join Phi ...
*
Blank Rome
Blank Rome (formerly known as Blank Rome Comisky & McCauley) is an Am Law 100 firm (ranked 81st in the 2019 AmLaw 100 Survey) with 14 offices and more than 600 attorneys and principals who provide legal and advocacy services to clients in the Un ...
Clifford Chance
Clifford Chance LLP is an international law firm headquartered in London, United Kingdom, and a member of the " Magic Circle", a group of London-based multinational law firms. It ranks as one of top ten largest law firms in the world measured ...
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Cohen Milstein
Cohen Milstein is an American plaintiffs' law firm that engages in large-scale class action litigation. The firm filed a number of lawsuits against Donald Trump during and after his presidency, including a lawsuit which successfully blocked the Tr ...
*
Covington & Burling
Covington & Burling LLP is an American multinational law firm. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the firm advises clients on transactional, litigation, regulatory, and public policy matters. In 2021, Vault.com ranked Covington & Burling as ...
*
Davis Wright Tremaine
Davis Wright Tremaine LLP is an American business and litigation law firm. Founded in 1944, the firm is a limited liability partnership and employs over 500 lawyers. Davis Wright Tremaine is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, and has offices i ...
*
Debevoise & Plimpton
Debevoise & Plimpton LLP (often shortened to Debevoise) is an international law firm headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1931 by Harvard Law School alumnus Eli Whitney Debevoise and Oxford-trained William Stevenson, the firm was origi ...
Dickstein Shapiro
Dickstein Shapiro LLP (formerly Dickstein, Shapiro, Morin & Oshinsky) was a large U.S. law firm and lobbying group based in Washington, D.C., with five offices across the United States. According to the National Law Journal's 2012 rankings, it wa ...
Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione
Gibbons P.C. is a large U.S. law firm with 200 lawyers in offices across four states including in New York, Philadelphia and Newark.
The firm is best known for its litigation department, which included retired judge John Gibbons. The depar ...
* Holland & Hart
*
Hunton & Williams
Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP is an American law firm created by the merger of Hunton & Williams LLP and Andrews Kurth Kenyon LLP on April 2, 2018. The firm has offices in 20 cities, primarily in the United States.
History
Hunton & Williams (formerl ...
Nixon Peabody
Nixon Peabody LLP is a Global 100 Boston-based law firm with more than 700 attorneys collaborating across major practice areas in cities across the U.S. and in international offices in London, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. In addition to the firm's ...
*
Northwestern University School of Law
Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law is the law school of Northwestern University, a private research university. It is located on the university's Chicago campus. Northwestern Law has been ranked among the top 14, or "T14" law scho ...
*
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP (known as Paul, Weiss) is an American multinational law firm headquartered on Sixth Avenue in New York City. By profits per equity partner, it is the fifth most profitable law firm in the world.
...
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Pepper Hamilton
Troutman Pepper Hamilton Sanders LLP, known as Troutman Pepper, is an American law firm with more than 1,200 attorneys located in 23 U.S. cities. In terms of revenue it placed 47th on The American Lawyer's 2022 AmLaw 100 rankings of U.S. law fi ...
Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman
Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, also known as Pillsbury, is a full-service law firm with a particular focus on the energy, financial services, real estate and technology industries. Based in the world's major financial, technology and energy ...
Schiff Hardin
Schiff Hardin LLP was a national law firm with more than 300 attorneys practicing out of seven offices nationwide — Ann Arbor, Chicago, Lake Forest, New York, Newport Beach, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. It was a general practice firm ...
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Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis
Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis LLP is a U.S. law firm based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, founded in Philadelphia in 1935 by former Pennsylvania Attorney General William A. Schnader, Bernard G. Segal, a former Deputy Attorney General serving ...
*
Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt
Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt ("Schwabe") is an American law firm with over 176 attorneys in eight cities on the West Coast. The firm is led by Graciela Gomez Cowger, CEO.
History
The firm was founded in 1892 by Ralph Wilber and Schuyler C. Spence ...
Shearman & Sterling
Shearman & Sterling LLP is a multinational law firm headquartered in New York City, United States. The firm's lawyers come from some 80 countries, speak more than 60 languages and practice US, English, EU, French, Spanish, German, Hong Kong, OH ...
Sutherland Asbill & Brennan
Sutherland Asbill & Brennan LLP, rebranded to the abbreviated name of Sutherland, was an AmLaw 100 American law firm. Founded in 1924 by William Sutherland and Elbert Tuttle as Sutherland & Tuttle, the firm originally achieved national promine ...
Weil, Gotshal & Manges
Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP is an American international law firm with approximately 1,100 attorneys, headquartered in New York City. With a gross annual revenue in excess of $1.8 billion, it is among the world's largest law firms according to ...
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Willkie Farr & Gallagher
Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, commonly known as Willkie, is a white-shoe, international law firm headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1888, the firm specializes in corporate practice and employs approximately 1000 lawyers in 13 offices a ...
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Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr
Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, also known as Hale & Dorr and WilmerHale, is an international law firm with offices in the United States, Europe and Asia. It is co-headquartered in Washington, D.C. and Boston. It was formed in 2004 thr ...