We’d be remiss if we didn’t link to Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage’s piece from Sunday on the Bush administration’s (read, vice president Cheney’s) ongoing struggle to subdue the military’s autonomous Judge Advocate General (JAG) corps.
Cheney’s failed attempts to bring the military lawyers under the thumb of the Pentagon’s appointed civilian leadership date back to George H.W. Bush’s administration, but the JAGs remain independent.
So, since the administration doesn’t like the JAGs’ advice, they’re ignoring it — as they have in the past (see: Abu Ghraib).
Most JAGs, Savage reports, oppose the use of secret evidence against detainees, and their “key request” of the new tribunal system that the administration is developing after the Supreme Court struck down the old system, is that detainees have the right to see the evidence against them. You might expect the administration to listen closely to the advice of the lawyers who will actually be carrying out the tribunals they’re designing, but…
… the administration doesn’t seem to be listening:
Most military lawyers strongly oppose allowing secret evidence, arguing that such a plan would probably violate the Geneva Conventions and create a precedent for enemies of the United States to use show-trials for captured Americans. But administration lawyers maintain that classified evidence may be crucial to a case, and revealing it would compromise national security.
Members of Congress have pressured the White House to listen to the military lawyers as it drafts the legislation, and on Aug. 2, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told lawmakers that “our deliberations have included detailed discussion” with military attorneys whose “multiple rounds of comments . . . will be reflected in the legislative package.”
But the issue of secret evidence, officials said, has been off the table for all of those discussions with the exception of one meeting between Gonzales and the top military lawyers in late July. The session ended in an impasse, and the issue has not been raised again, they said.
Instead, new guidelines are being drafted by Bush-appointed attorneys in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. They met just once with a working group of military lawyers on July 28, following up with e-mail exchanges that stopped after the first week of August, according to officials.
At the start of the July 28 meeting, the officials said, the administration’s lawyers announced that there was no point in debating the secret evidence issue at their level, so all their subsequent discussions were limited to more minor concerns — mostly wording changes and procedural matters.
The whole piece is worth a read.
