An interesting article was published in the New York Times today, recounting what appears to be a more and more aggravated situation at detainee camps in Guantánamo Bay. With the revocation of the right to habeus corpus last year and the recent proposal from the Justice Department to limit the amount of times lawyers can visit detainees, many detainees are feeling an increased sense of desperation and suspicion towards their lawyers and military officials.

As a result, detainees have become increasingly inclined to mistrust or refuse to communicate with their lawyers, under the suspicion that military officials will eavesdrop on their conversation, seize their letters (which has happened before, after the triple suicide at one of the camps last June), or worse. This series of legal setbacks and its effect on the detainees is evaluated in an article by William Glaberson, shown below (also on the Times online, which you can find here:

Many of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are no longer cooperating with their lawyers, adding a largely invisible struggle between the lawyers and their own clients to the legal battle over the Bush administration’s detention policies.

Some detainees refuse to see their lawyers, while others decline mail from their lawyers or refuse to provide them information on their cases, according to court documents, writings of some of the detainees and recent interviews.

The detainees’ resistance appears to have been fueled by frustration over their long detention and suspicion about whether their lawyers are working for the government, as well as anti-American sentiment, some of the documents and interviews show. “Your role is to polish Bush’s shoes and make the picture look good,” a Yemeni detainee, Adnan Farhan Abdullatif, 31, wrote his lawyer in February.

Some of the lawyers accuse Guantánamo officials of feeding the detainees’ suspicions of the lawyers, a charge Pentagon officials deny.

Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor perhaps best-known for his defense of O.J. Simpson, is speaking tonight in Memorial Auditorium at 7PM. His arrival on the Stanford campus is prompting several student groups -- including Stanford Amnesty -- to protest and flier at the event to raise awareness of his position on torture and to more generally confront the "ticking time-bomb" debate. Here we present to you several interesting quotes and resources that we hope you can use to learn about the issue and decide for yourself where you stand on the issue.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz -- one of the country's leading civil libertarians -- suggests creating a mechanism where U.S. judges could approve domestic "torture warrants" if they're convinced such tactics could thwart an imminent attack.

"Everybody says they're opposed to torture. But everyone would do it personally if they knew it could save the life of a kidnapped child who had only two hours of oxygen left before death. And it would be the right thing to do," said Dershowitz.

But it's uncertain if such techniques would actually work. And if they did, could they be morally justified?

"The fact that we're even having this conversation shows how much things have changed since Sept. 11," said Stanford criminal law professor Robert Weisberg, known as a defender of civil liberties.

The strongest argument for rougher interrogations of those now custody is that getting them to talk, by whatever means, might foil future attacks -- possibly even a cataclysmic assault with a biochemical weapon or radioactive "dirty bomb" that could kill tens of thousands of Americans.

If U.S. interrogators ever were certain that extracting information forcibly was their only option to thwart a cataclysmic attack, they probably would just do it, says Charles Weisselberg, a University of California at Berkeley law professor. Yes, they would risk a civil suit and even prosecution.

But the odds are no jury would ever convict them. So, he says, there's no need to legislate permission.

The fact that some Americans now support coercive methods of interrogation, such as truth serum injections, leaves human rights advocates aghast.

"Once you break the barrier, you devalue your own civilization and you sow the seeds of future torture," warns Amnesty International spokesman Alistair Hodgett. "When any society justifies torture, it usually starts with that dramatic 'ticking time bomb' scenario, and inevitably it spreads throughout the justice system. I think it's fair to say any acknowledgment in the U.S. will send a dangerous message of tolerance to torture to be heard around the world." (San Francisco Chronicle)

Yesterday I saw the following headline on the BBC website: "Guantanamo Saudi 'kills himself'"- the article reports that there are currently 380 prisoners there and that some of them have been held for 5 years. This inmate has not been the first to commit suicide, and he likely will not be the last, as long as the detainees are held indefinately without any of their basic rights, including the right to be charged with a crime, to hear the charges against them, to see the evidence against them, to refute the evidence against them, and the right to an attorney.

I forwarded this article to the Stanford Amnesty list, and received a response that brings up some important questions:

The questions that were asked are:
1. Should the prison camp be closed down?
2. If so, where should the prisoners go?
3. Do you think any of them are probably guilty of fighting a war against us?

I replied with the a rather long email...