Law Review: The law, not ideology, motivates Guantanamo attorneys

As a military intelligence officer in the Mekong River Delta region of Vietnam in the late 1960s, where U.S. forces battled both the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong, Chris Walters had no trouble identifying enemy soldiers.

They were the ones who were shooting at you.

It was Walters' job to find out where the enemy stored munitions, what they had in the way of defenses, and what their battlefield plans were. The people Walters interrogated had been picked up following shoot-outs or had been pulled out of bunkers stuffed with weapons.

So when the opportunity emerged a few years ago for Walters, by then a senior litigator at Reed Smith, to represent Guantanamo detainees, he and a handful of other lawyers with military backgrounds jumped at the chance.

Because many of the detainees had not been picked up on the battlefield, but rather on information from paid informants, the basis for the confinement of at least some of them was questionable, Walters reasoned.

Just as compelling was the fact that the detainees had no means of challenging their imprisonment.

In effect, Guantanamo had become a legal black hole.

"We were not dealing with left-wing tree huggers here," Walters said of the Reed Smith lawyers who represented Guantanamo inmates. "We were talking about military combat leaders."

Since the prison camp opened Jan. 11, 2002, about 850 lawyers from 120 private firms, including the nation's biggest and most prestigious, have represented the detainees, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, a liberal advocacy group that helped coordinate the legal strategy.

In Philadelphia, firms providing legal services to Guantanamo prisoners, sometimes in the face of resistance from commercial clients, include not only Reed Smith, a Pittsburgh-based mega-firm with a 150-lawyer office in Center City, but also Dechert L.L.P., Ballard Spahr, and Hangley Aronchick Segal & Pudlin P.C.

In what has become the great circus of American political discourse, the Guantanamo prison camp is an ideological Rorschach test: Depending on your politics, the detainment of hundreds of accused al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters at Guantanamo in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks constitutes either a massive human-rights abuse or a necessary means for protecting the nation from attack.

The reality is somewhat more nuanced.