Gitmo's Guerrilla Lawyers
Mar 7th 2007, 7:59 pm
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Guest
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Gitmo's Guerrilla Lawyers
He was the first American to die in what some have called "the real
war." Johnny "Mike" Spann, the 32-year-old CIA paramilitary commando,
was interrogating prisoners in an open courtyard at the Qala-I-Jangi
fortress in Afghanistan when the uprising of 538 hard-core Taliban and
al Qaeda fighters began. Spann emptied his rifle, then his sidearm,
then fought hand-to-hand as he was swarmed by raging prisoners
screaming "Allahu akbar!"
The bloody siege by Northern Alliance and U.S. forces went on for
several days, only ending when 86 of the remaining jihadi fighters
were smoked out of a basement where they had retreated and where they
murdered a Red Cross worker who had gone in to check on their
condition. Spann, a former Marine, is credited with saving the lives
of countless Alliance fighters and Afghan civilians by standing and
firing as they ran for cover. His beaten and booby-trapped body was
recovered with two bullet wounds in his head, the angle of trajectory
suggesting he had been shot execution style.
One of the committed jihadis who came out of that basement, wounded
and unrepentant, was "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, now serving
a 20-year sentence in a federal prison. Another who was shot during
the uprising and pulled out of the basement along with Lindh was
Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi. Today, the 29-year-old is living
somewhere in Kuwait, a free man.
The true story of Mr. Mutairi's journey, from the uprising in Qala-I-
Jangi to Guantanamo Bay's military detention camp to the privileged
life of an affluent Kuwaiti citizen, is one that his team of high-
priced lawyers and the government of Kuwait doesn't want you to know.
His case reveals a disturbing counterpoint to the false narrative
advanced by Gitmo lawyers and human-rights groups -- which holds that
the Guantanamo Bay detainees are innocent victims of circumstance,
swept up in the angry, anti-Muslim fervor that followed the attacks of
September 11, then abused and brutally tortured at the hands of the
U.S. military.
Mr. Mutairi was among 12 Kuwaitis picked up in Afghanistan and
detained at Guantanamo Bay in 2002. Their families retained Tom Wilner
and the prestigious law firm of Shearman & Sterling early that same
year. Arguably, it is Mr. Wilner's aggressive representation, along
with the determined efforts of the Kuwait government, that has had the
greatest influence in the outcome of all the enemy combatant cases, in
the court of law and in the court of public opinion. The lawsuit filed
on their behalf, renamed Rasul v. Bush when three cases were joined,
is credited with opening the door for the blizzard of litigation that
followed.
According to Michael Ratner, the radical lawyer and head of the Center
for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the center received 300 pieces of
hate mail when the organization filed the very first Guantanamo
detainee case in February of 2002. The shocking images of 9/11 were
still fresh; it would be three more months until most human remains
and rubble would be cleared from ground zero. There was no interest in
Guantanamo from the lawyers at premium law firms.
But by 2004, when the first of three detainee cases was heard by the
U.S. Supreme Court, the national climate had changed. The country was
politically divided, the presidential election was in full swing, and
John Kerry was talking about treating terrorism like a criminal
nuisance. The Guantanamo cases gave lawyers a chance to take a swipe
at the president's policies, give heroic speeches about protecting the
rights of indigents, and be a part of the kind of landmark legal cases
that come along once in a lifetime. The Guantanamo Bay Bar increased
from a lonely band of activist lawyers operating out of a run down
office in Greenwich Village to an association of 500 lawyers. Said Mr.
Ratner about the blue chip firms that initially shunned these cases,
"You had to beat the lawyers off with a stick."
Mr. Wilner and his colleagues at Shearman & Sterling were the
exception, although he has been exceedingly coy about the true nature
of his firm's role. Unlike the many lawyers who later joined in the
litigation on a pro bono basis, Shearman & Sterling was handsomely
paid. Mr. Wilner has repeatedly stated that the detainees' families
insisted on paying Shearman & Sterling for its services and that the
fees it earned have been donated to an unspecified 9/11-related
charity. According to one news report, the families had spent $2
million in legal fees by mid-2004. In truth, Kuwaiti officials
confirmed that the government was footing the bills.
How did Shearman & Sterling get tapped for this historic assignment?
Speaking at Seton Hall Law School in fall of 2006, Mr. Wilner
recounted that he visited the facility at Guantanamo Bay in 2002,
months before he met the Kuwaiti 12's families. What was Mr. Wilner
doing at Gitmo more than two years before Rasul established the legal
basis for lawyers getting access to detainees inside the camp? One of
his Gitmo legal colleagues has said that Mr. Wilner was brought into
the case by an oil industry client.
It turns out that Shearman & Sterling, a 1,000-lawyer firm with
offices in 19 cities all over the world, has substantial business
dealings on six continents. Indeed, Shearman's client care for Middle
Eastern matters has established a new industry standard: The firm's
Abu Dhabi office states that it has pioneered the concept of "Shariah-
compliant" financing. In Kuwait, the firm has represented the
government on a wide variety of matters involving billions of dollars
worth of assets. So the party underwriting the litigation on behalf of
the Kuwaiti 12 -- from which all of the detainees have benefited -- is
one of Shearman & Sterling's most lucrative OPEC accounts.
Shearman & Sterling did far more than just write legal briefs and
shuttle down to Gitmo to conduct interviews about alleged torture for
the BBC. In addition to its legal services, the firm registered as an
agent of a foreign principal under the Foreign Agents Registration Act
of 1938 (FARA) as well as the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (LDA) to
press the Kuwaiti detainees' cause on Capitol Hill. Shearman reported
$749,980 in lobbying fees under FARA for one six-month period in 2005
and another $200,000 under the LDA over a one-year period between 2005
and 2006. Those are the precise time periods when Congress was engaged
in intense debates over the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military
Commissions Act, legislation which Shearman & Sterling and its Kuwaiti
paymasters hoped would pave the way for shutting down Guantanamo
permanently and setting their clients free.
Mr. Wilner, a media-savvy lawyer who immediately realized that the
detainee cases posed a tremendous PR challenge in the wake of
September 11, hired high-stakes media guru Richard Levick to change
public perception about the Kuwaiti 12. Mr. Levick, a former attorney
whose Washington, D.C.-based "crisis PR" firm has carved out a niche
in litigation-related issues, has represented clients as varied as
Rosie O'Donnell, Napster, and the Roman Catholic Church. Mr. Levick's
firm is also registered under FARA as an agent of a foreign principal
for the "Kuwaiti Detainees Committee," reporting $774,000 in fees in a
one year period. After the U.S. Supreme Court heard the first
consolidated case, the PR campaign went into high gear, Mr. Levick
wrote, to "turn the Guantanamo tide."
In numerous published articles and interviews, Mr. Levick has laid out
the essence of the entire Kuwaiti PR campaign. The strategy sought to
accomplish two things: put a sympathetic "human face" on the detainees
and convince the public that it had a stake in their plight. In other
words, the militant Islamists who traveled to Afghanistan to become a
part of al Qaeda's jihad on America had to be reinvented as innocent
charity workers swept up in the war after 9/11. The committed Islamist
who admitted firing an AK-47 in a Taliban training camp became a
"teacher on vacation" who went to Afghanistan in 2001 "to help
refugees." The member of an Islamist street gang who opened three al-
Wafa offices with Suliman Abu Ghaith (Osama Bin Laden's chief
spokesman) to raise al Qaeda funds became a charity worker whose eight
children were left destitute in his absence. All 12 Kuwaitis became
the innocent victims of "bounty hunters."
A Montreal-based marketing firm was hired to create the families' full-
service Web site which fed propaganda -- unsourced, unrebutted and
uninvestigated by the media -- aimed at the media all over the world.
Creating what Mr. Levick calls a "war of pictures," the site is
replete with images meant to appeal to Americans: smiling Kuwaiti
families wearing T-shirts and baseball caps, cute children passing out
yellow ribbons.
After the Rasul decision, the PR momentum picked up speed and the
Supreme Court became, in Mr. Levick's words, their "main weapon," a
"cudgel" that forced more attention in what he calls the traditional
"liberal" press. Dozens of op-eds by Mr. Wilner and the family group
leader (described as a U.S.-trained former Kuwaiti Air Force pilot who
cherishes the memory of drinking Coca Cola) were aimed at the public
and Congress.
Mr. Levick maintains that a year and a half after they began the
campaign, their PR outreach produced literally thousands of news
placements and that, eventually, a majority of the top 100 newspapers
were editorializing on the detainees' behalf. Convinced that judges
can be influenced by aggressive PR campaigns, Mr. Levick points to
rulings in the detainee cases which openly cite news stories that
resulted from his team's media outreach.
The Kuwaiti 12 case is a primer on the anatomy of a guerilla PR
offensive, packaged and sold to the public as a fight for the "rule of
law" and "America's core principles." Begin with flimsy information,
generate stories that are spun from uncorroborated double or triple
hearsay uttered by interested parties that are hard to confirm from
halfway around the world. Feed the phonied-up stories to friendly
media who write credulous reports and emotional human interest
features, post them on a Web site where they will then be read and
used as sources by other lazy (or busy) media from all over the world.
In short, create one giant echo chamber.
Mr. Mutairi's profile is the most brazen example of Mr. Levick's
confidence that the media can be easily manipulated. The Web site
describes him as a member of an apolitical and peaceful sect of
missionaries, and that he went to Afghanistan in October of 2000 to
"minister in the small mosques and schools" in the country's poorer
regions.
Everything Mr. Levick did was in partnership with Tom Wilner and the
law firm of Sherman & Sterling. It was their joint litigation-PR plan,
with the Guantanamo lawsuits helping the PR messaging and the PR
messaging helping the lawsuits. All of this may be legal, but it is
hardly ethical.
Shearman & Sterling lawyers aren't hucksters crassly promoting a cheap
product; they are sworn officers of the court volunteering to
represent alien enemy combatants in a time of war, interjecting
themselves in cases that affect how American soldiers on the
battlefield do their job. It is one thing to take these cases in order
to achieve the proper balance between due process concerns and
unprecedented national security issues. It is another to hire PR and
marketing consultants to create image makeovers for suspected al Qaeda
financiers, foot soldiers, weapons trainers and bomb makers, all of
which is financed by millions of dollars from a foreign country
enmeshed in the anti-American, anti-Israel elements of Middle East
politics.
Although a few mistakes were made when some of the Guantanamo
detainees were taken into custody in the fog of war, others were
indisputably captured with AK-47s still smoking in their hands. Any
one of those who have been properly classified in Combat Status Review
Tribunals as an unlawful enemy combatant could be the next Mohamed
Atta or Hani Hanjour, who, if captured in the summer of 2001, would
have been described by these lawyers as a quiet engineering student
from Hamburg and a nice Saudi kid who dreams of learning to fly.
How we deal with alien enemy combatants goes to the essence of the
debate between those who see terrorism as a series of criminal acts
that should be litigated in the justice system, one attack at a time,
and those who see it as a global war where the "criminal paradigm" is
no more effective against militant Islamists whose chief tactic is
mass murder than indictments would have been in stopping Hitler's
march across Europe. Michael Ratner and the lawyers in the Gitmo bar
have expressly stated that the habeas corpus lawsuits are a tactic to
prevent the U.S. military from doing its job. He has bragged that "The
litigation is brutal . . . You can't run an interrogation . . . with
attorneys." No, you can't. Lawyers can literally get us killed.
We may never know how many of the hundreds of repatriated detainees
are back in action, fighting the U.S. or our allies thanks to the
efforts of the Guantanamo Bay Bar. Approximately 20 former detainees
have been confirmed as having returned to the battlefield, 12 of them
killed by U.S. forces. Of the eight detainees who were rendered back
to Kuwait for review of their cases, all were acquitted in criminal
proceedings, including Mr. Mutairi, who has given press interviews
admitting that he was shot in the November 2001 uprising at Qala-I-
Jangi.
Only one Kuwaiti, Adel al-Zamel, has been sent to prison for crimes
committed before his work with al-Wafa in Afghanistan. A member of an
Islamist gang that stalked, videotaped and savagely beat "adulterers,"
he was sentenced to a year in prison in 2000 for attacking a coed
sitting in her car. These are some of the men Tom Wilner was talking
about when he went on national television and said with a straight
face, "My guys . . . loved the United States."
The guy who really loved the United States stood and fought to protect
us from radical Islamists, rather than enable them. In his job
application for the CIA, Mike Spann wrote, "I am an action person that
feels personally responsible for making any changes in this world that
are in my power because if I don't no one else will." We owe our
unqualified support and steadfastness to the warriors who take
personal responsibility when no one else will.
Allowing lawyers to subvert the truth and transform the Constitution
into a lethal weapon in the hands of our enemies -- while casting
themselves as patriots -- makes a mockery of the sacrifices made by
true patriots like Mike Spann. If Sens. Patrick Leahy and Arlen
Specter, chairman and ranking members, respectively, of the Senate
Judiciary Committee succeed in their plan to turn enemy combatant
cases over to the federal courts, we will sorely rue the day that we
eliminated "lawyer-free zones."
Ms. Burlingame, a former attorney and a director of the World Trade
Center Memorial Foundation, is the sister of Charles F. "Chic"
Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was
crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
war." Johnny "Mike" Spann, the 32-year-old CIA paramilitary commando,
was interrogating prisoners in an open courtyard at the Qala-I-Jangi
fortress in Afghanistan when the uprising of 538 hard-core Taliban and
al Qaeda fighters began. Spann emptied his rifle, then his sidearm,
then fought hand-to-hand as he was swarmed by raging prisoners
screaming "Allahu akbar!"
The bloody siege by Northern Alliance and U.S. forces went on for
several days, only ending when 86 of the remaining jihadi fighters
were smoked out of a basement where they had retreated and where they
murdered a Red Cross worker who had gone in to check on their
condition. Spann, a former Marine, is credited with saving the lives
of countless Alliance fighters and Afghan civilians by standing and
firing as they ran for cover. His beaten and booby-trapped body was
recovered with two bullet wounds in his head, the angle of trajectory
suggesting he had been shot execution style.
One of the committed jihadis who came out of that basement, wounded
and unrepentant, was "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, now serving
a 20-year sentence in a federal prison. Another who was shot during
the uprising and pulled out of the basement along with Lindh was
Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi. Today, the 29-year-old is living
somewhere in Kuwait, a free man.
The true story of Mr. Mutairi's journey, from the uprising in Qala-I-
Jangi to Guantanamo Bay's military detention camp to the privileged
life of an affluent Kuwaiti citizen, is one that his team of high-
priced lawyers and the government of Kuwait doesn't want you to know.
His case reveals a disturbing counterpoint to the false narrative
advanced by Gitmo lawyers and human-rights groups -- which holds that
the Guantanamo Bay detainees are innocent victims of circumstance,
swept up in the angry, anti-Muslim fervor that followed the attacks of
September 11, then abused and brutally tortured at the hands of the
U.S. military.
Mr. Mutairi was among 12 Kuwaitis picked up in Afghanistan and
detained at Guantanamo Bay in 2002. Their families retained Tom Wilner
and the prestigious law firm of Shearman & Sterling early that same
year. Arguably, it is Mr. Wilner's aggressive representation, along
with the determined efforts of the Kuwait government, that has had the
greatest influence in the outcome of all the enemy combatant cases, in
the court of law and in the court of public opinion. The lawsuit filed
on their behalf, renamed Rasul v. Bush when three cases were joined,
is credited with opening the door for the blizzard of litigation that
followed.
According to Michael Ratner, the radical lawyer and head of the Center
for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the center received 300 pieces of
hate mail when the organization filed the very first Guantanamo
detainee case in February of 2002. The shocking images of 9/11 were
still fresh; it would be three more months until most human remains
and rubble would be cleared from ground zero. There was no interest in
Guantanamo from the lawyers at premium law firms.
But by 2004, when the first of three detainee cases was heard by the
U.S. Supreme Court, the national climate had changed. The country was
politically divided, the presidential election was in full swing, and
John Kerry was talking about treating terrorism like a criminal
nuisance. The Guantanamo cases gave lawyers a chance to take a swipe
at the president's policies, give heroic speeches about protecting the
rights of indigents, and be a part of the kind of landmark legal cases
that come along once in a lifetime. The Guantanamo Bay Bar increased
from a lonely band of activist lawyers operating out of a run down
office in Greenwich Village to an association of 500 lawyers. Said Mr.
Ratner about the blue chip firms that initially shunned these cases,
"You had to beat the lawyers off with a stick."
Mr. Wilner and his colleagues at Shearman & Sterling were the
exception, although he has been exceedingly coy about the true nature
of his firm's role. Unlike the many lawyers who later joined in the
litigation on a pro bono basis, Shearman & Sterling was handsomely
paid. Mr. Wilner has repeatedly stated that the detainees' families
insisted on paying Shearman & Sterling for its services and that the
fees it earned have been donated to an unspecified 9/11-related
charity. According to one news report, the families had spent $2
million in legal fees by mid-2004. In truth, Kuwaiti officials
confirmed that the government was footing the bills.
How did Shearman & Sterling get tapped for this historic assignment?
Speaking at Seton Hall Law School in fall of 2006, Mr. Wilner
recounted that he visited the facility at Guantanamo Bay in 2002,
months before he met the Kuwaiti 12's families. What was Mr. Wilner
doing at Gitmo more than two years before Rasul established the legal
basis for lawyers getting access to detainees inside the camp? One of
his Gitmo legal colleagues has said that Mr. Wilner was brought into
the case by an oil industry client.
It turns out that Shearman & Sterling, a 1,000-lawyer firm with
offices in 19 cities all over the world, has substantial business
dealings on six continents. Indeed, Shearman's client care for Middle
Eastern matters has established a new industry standard: The firm's
Abu Dhabi office states that it has pioneered the concept of "Shariah-
compliant" financing. In Kuwait, the firm has represented the
government on a wide variety of matters involving billions of dollars
worth of assets. So the party underwriting the litigation on behalf of
the Kuwaiti 12 -- from which all of the detainees have benefited -- is
one of Shearman & Sterling's most lucrative OPEC accounts.
Shearman & Sterling did far more than just write legal briefs and
shuttle down to Gitmo to conduct interviews about alleged torture for
the BBC. In addition to its legal services, the firm registered as an
agent of a foreign principal under the Foreign Agents Registration Act
of 1938 (FARA) as well as the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (LDA) to
press the Kuwaiti detainees' cause on Capitol Hill. Shearman reported
$749,980 in lobbying fees under FARA for one six-month period in 2005
and another $200,000 under the LDA over a one-year period between 2005
and 2006. Those are the precise time periods when Congress was engaged
in intense debates over the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military
Commissions Act, legislation which Shearman & Sterling and its Kuwaiti
paymasters hoped would pave the way for shutting down Guantanamo
permanently and setting their clients free.
Mr. Wilner, a media-savvy lawyer who immediately realized that the
detainee cases posed a tremendous PR challenge in the wake of
September 11, hired high-stakes media guru Richard Levick to change
public perception about the Kuwaiti 12. Mr. Levick, a former attorney
whose Washington, D.C.-based "crisis PR" firm has carved out a niche
in litigation-related issues, has represented clients as varied as
Rosie O'Donnell, Napster, and the Roman Catholic Church. Mr. Levick's
firm is also registered under FARA as an agent of a foreign principal
for the "Kuwaiti Detainees Committee," reporting $774,000 in fees in a
one year period. After the U.S. Supreme Court heard the first
consolidated case, the PR campaign went into high gear, Mr. Levick
wrote, to "turn the Guantanamo tide."
In numerous published articles and interviews, Mr. Levick has laid out
the essence of the entire Kuwaiti PR campaign. The strategy sought to
accomplish two things: put a sympathetic "human face" on the detainees
and convince the public that it had a stake in their plight. In other
words, the militant Islamists who traveled to Afghanistan to become a
part of al Qaeda's jihad on America had to be reinvented as innocent
charity workers swept up in the war after 9/11. The committed Islamist
who admitted firing an AK-47 in a Taliban training camp became a
"teacher on vacation" who went to Afghanistan in 2001 "to help
refugees." The member of an Islamist street gang who opened three al-
Wafa offices with Suliman Abu Ghaith (Osama Bin Laden's chief
spokesman) to raise al Qaeda funds became a charity worker whose eight
children were left destitute in his absence. All 12 Kuwaitis became
the innocent victims of "bounty hunters."
A Montreal-based marketing firm was hired to create the families' full-
service Web site which fed propaganda -- unsourced, unrebutted and
uninvestigated by the media -- aimed at the media all over the world.
Creating what Mr. Levick calls a "war of pictures," the site is
replete with images meant to appeal to Americans: smiling Kuwaiti
families wearing T-shirts and baseball caps, cute children passing out
yellow ribbons.
After the Rasul decision, the PR momentum picked up speed and the
Supreme Court became, in Mr. Levick's words, their "main weapon," a
"cudgel" that forced more attention in what he calls the traditional
"liberal" press. Dozens of op-eds by Mr. Wilner and the family group
leader (described as a U.S.-trained former Kuwaiti Air Force pilot who
cherishes the memory of drinking Coca Cola) were aimed at the public
and Congress.
Mr. Levick maintains that a year and a half after they began the
campaign, their PR outreach produced literally thousands of news
placements and that, eventually, a majority of the top 100 newspapers
were editorializing on the detainees' behalf. Convinced that judges
can be influenced by aggressive PR campaigns, Mr. Levick points to
rulings in the detainee cases which openly cite news stories that
resulted from his team's media outreach.
The Kuwaiti 12 case is a primer on the anatomy of a guerilla PR
offensive, packaged and sold to the public as a fight for the "rule of
law" and "America's core principles." Begin with flimsy information,
generate stories that are spun from uncorroborated double or triple
hearsay uttered by interested parties that are hard to confirm from
halfway around the world. Feed the phonied-up stories to friendly
media who write credulous reports and emotional human interest
features, post them on a Web site where they will then be read and
used as sources by other lazy (or busy) media from all over the world.
In short, create one giant echo chamber.
Mr. Mutairi's profile is the most brazen example of Mr. Levick's
confidence that the media can be easily manipulated. The Web site
describes him as a member of an apolitical and peaceful sect of
missionaries, and that he went to Afghanistan in October of 2000 to
"minister in the small mosques and schools" in the country's poorer
regions.
Everything Mr. Levick did was in partnership with Tom Wilner and the
law firm of Sherman & Sterling. It was their joint litigation-PR plan,
with the Guantanamo lawsuits helping the PR messaging and the PR
messaging helping the lawsuits. All of this may be legal, but it is
hardly ethical.
Shearman & Sterling lawyers aren't hucksters crassly promoting a cheap
product; they are sworn officers of the court volunteering to
represent alien enemy combatants in a time of war, interjecting
themselves in cases that affect how American soldiers on the
battlefield do their job. It is one thing to take these cases in order
to achieve the proper balance between due process concerns and
unprecedented national security issues. It is another to hire PR and
marketing consultants to create image makeovers for suspected al Qaeda
financiers, foot soldiers, weapons trainers and bomb makers, all of
which is financed by millions of dollars from a foreign country
enmeshed in the anti-American, anti-Israel elements of Middle East
politics.
Although a few mistakes were made when some of the Guantanamo
detainees were taken into custody in the fog of war, others were
indisputably captured with AK-47s still smoking in their hands. Any
one of those who have been properly classified in Combat Status Review
Tribunals as an unlawful enemy combatant could be the next Mohamed
Atta or Hani Hanjour, who, if captured in the summer of 2001, would
have been described by these lawyers as a quiet engineering student
from Hamburg and a nice Saudi kid who dreams of learning to fly.
How we deal with alien enemy combatants goes to the essence of the
debate between those who see terrorism as a series of criminal acts
that should be litigated in the justice system, one attack at a time,
and those who see it as a global war where the "criminal paradigm" is
no more effective against militant Islamists whose chief tactic is
mass murder than indictments would have been in stopping Hitler's
march across Europe. Michael Ratner and the lawyers in the Gitmo bar
have expressly stated that the habeas corpus lawsuits are a tactic to
prevent the U.S. military from doing its job. He has bragged that "The
litigation is brutal . . . You can't run an interrogation . . . with
attorneys." No, you can't. Lawyers can literally get us killed.
We may never know how many of the hundreds of repatriated detainees
are back in action, fighting the U.S. or our allies thanks to the
efforts of the Guantanamo Bay Bar. Approximately 20 former detainees
have been confirmed as having returned to the battlefield, 12 of them
killed by U.S. forces. Of the eight detainees who were rendered back
to Kuwait for review of their cases, all were acquitted in criminal
proceedings, including Mr. Mutairi, who has given press interviews
admitting that he was shot in the November 2001 uprising at Qala-I-
Jangi.
Only one Kuwaiti, Adel al-Zamel, has been sent to prison for crimes
committed before his work with al-Wafa in Afghanistan. A member of an
Islamist gang that stalked, videotaped and savagely beat "adulterers,"
he was sentenced to a year in prison in 2000 for attacking a coed
sitting in her car. These are some of the men Tom Wilner was talking
about when he went on national television and said with a straight
face, "My guys . . . loved the United States."
The guy who really loved the United States stood and fought to protect
us from radical Islamists, rather than enable them. In his job
application for the CIA, Mike Spann wrote, "I am an action person that
feels personally responsible for making any changes in this world that
are in my power because if I don't no one else will." We owe our
unqualified support and steadfastness to the warriors who take
personal responsibility when no one else will.
Allowing lawyers to subvert the truth and transform the Constitution
into a lethal weapon in the hands of our enemies -- while casting
themselves as patriots -- makes a mockery of the sacrifices made by
true patriots like Mike Spann. If Sens. Patrick Leahy and Arlen
Specter, chairman and ranking members, respectively, of the Senate
Judiciary Committee succeed in their plan to turn enemy combatant
cases over to the federal courts, we will sorely rue the day that we
eliminated "lawyer-free zones."
Ms. Burlingame, a former attorney and a director of the World Trade
Center Memorial Foundation, is the sister of Charles F. "Chic"
Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was
crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
Mar 7th 2007, 8:13 pm
#2
Guest
Posts: n/a
Re: Gitmo's Guerrilla Lawyers
On 8/03/07 9:59, in article
[email protected]. com, "Earl Evleth"
<[email protected]> wrote:
forgery by Stephen Bach
[email protected]. com, "Earl Evleth"
<[email protected]> wrote:
forgery by Stephen Bach
Mar 8th 2007, 5:25 pm
#3
Guest
Posts: n/a
Re: Gitmo's Guerrilla Lawyers
On Mar 8, 3:59?am, "Earl Evleth" <[email protected]> wrote:
> He was the first American to die in what some have called "the real
> war." Johnny "Mike" Spann, the 32-year-old CIA paramilitary commando,
> was interrogating prisoners in an open courtyard at the Qala-I-Jangi
> fortress in Afghanistan when the uprising of 538 hard-core Taliban and
> al Qaeda fighters began. Spann emptied his rifle, then his sidearm,
> then fought hand-to-hand as he was swarmed by raging prisoners
> screaming "Allahu akbar!"
>
> The bloody siege by Northern Alliance and U.S. forces went on for
> several days, only ending when 86 of the remaining jihadi fighters
> were smoked out of a basement where they had retreated and where they
> murdered a Red Cross worker who had gone in to check on their
> condition. Spann, a former Marine, is credited with saving the lives
> of countless Alliance fighters and Afghan civilians by standing and
> firing as they ran for cover. His beaten and booby-trapped body was
> recovered with two bullet wounds in his head, the angle of trajectory
> suggesting he had been shot execution style.
>
> One of the committed jihadis who came out of that basement, wounded
> and unrepentant, was "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, now serving
> a 20-year sentence in a federal prison. Another who was shot during
> the uprising and pulled out of the basement along with Lindh was
> Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi. Today, the 29-year-old is living
> somewhere in Kuwait, a free man.
>
> The true story of Mr. Mutairi's journey, from the uprising in Qala-I-
> Jangi to Guantanamo Bay's military detention camp to the privileged
> life of an affluent Kuwaiti citizen, is one that his team of high-
> priced lawyers and the government of Kuwait doesn't want you to know.
> His case reveals a disturbing counterpoint to the false narrative
> advanced by Gitmo lawyers and human-rights groups -- which holds that
> the Guantanamo Bay detainees are innocent victims of circumstance,
> swept up in the angry, anti-Muslim fervor that followed the attacks of
> September 11, then abused and brutally tortured at the hands of the
> U.S. military.
>
> Mr. Mutairi was among 12 Kuwaitis picked up in Afghanistan and
> detained at Guantanamo Bay in 2002. Their families retained Tom Wilner
> and the prestigious law firm of Shearman & Sterling early that same
> year. Arguably, it is Mr. Wilner's aggressive representation, along
> with the determined efforts of the Kuwait government, that has had the
> greatest influence in the outcome of all the enemy combatant cases, in
> the court of law and in the court of public opinion. The lawsuit filed
> on their behalf, renamed Rasul v. Bush when three cases were joined,
> is credited with opening the door for the blizzard of litigation that
> followed.
>
> According to Michael Ratner, the radical lawyer and head of the Center
> for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the center received 300 pieces of
> hate mail when the organization filed the very first Guantanamo
> detainee case in February of 2002. The shocking images of 9/11 were
> still fresh; it would be three more months until most human remains
> and rubble would be cleared from ground zero. There was no interest in
> Guantanamo from the lawyers at premium law firms.
>
> But by 2004, when the first of three detainee cases was heard by the
> U.S. Supreme Court, the national climate had changed. The country was
> politically divided, the presidential election was in full swing, and
> John Kerry was talking about treating terrorism like a criminal
> nuisance. The Guantanamo cases gave lawyers a chance to take a swipe
> at the president's policies, give heroic speeches about protecting the
> rights of indigents, and be a part of the kind of landmark legal cases
> that come along once in a lifetime. The Guantanamo Bay Bar increased
> from a lonely band of activist lawyers operating out of a run down
> office in Greenwich Village to an association of 500 lawyers. Said Mr.
> Ratner about the blue chip firms that initially shunned these cases,
> "You had to beat the lawyers off with a stick."
>
> Mr. Wilner and his colleagues at Shearman & Sterling were the
> exception, although he has been exceedingly coy about the true nature
> of his firm's role. Unlike the many lawyers who later joined in the
> litigation on a pro bono basis, Shearman & Sterling was handsomely
> paid. Mr. Wilner has repeatedly stated that the detainees' families
> insisted on paying Shearman & Sterling for its services and that the
> fees it earned have been donated to an unspecified 9/11-related
> charity. According to one news report, the families had spent $2
> million in legal fees by mid-2004. In truth, Kuwaiti officials
> confirmed that the government was footing the bills.
>
> How did Shearman & Sterling get tapped for this historic assignment?
> Speaking at Seton Hall Law School in fall of 2006, Mr. Wilner
> recounted that he visited the facility at Guantanamo Bay in 2002,
> months before he met the Kuwaiti 12's families. What was Mr. Wilner
> doing at Gitmo more than two years before Rasul established the legal
> basis for lawyers getting access to detainees inside the camp? One of
> his Gitmo legal colleagues has said that Mr. Wilner was brought into
> the case by an oil industry client.
>
> It turns out that Shearman & Sterling, a 1,000-lawyer firm with
> offices in 19 cities all over the world, has substantial business
> dealings on six continents. Indeed, Shearman's client care for Middle
> Eastern matters has established a new industry standard: The firm's
> Abu Dhabi office states that it has pioneered the concept of "Shariah-
> compliant" financing. In Kuwait, the firm has represented the
> government on a wide variety of matters involving billions of dollars
> worth of assets. So the party underwriting the litigation on behalf of
> the Kuwaiti 12 -- from which all of the detainees have benefited -- is
> one of Shearman & Sterling's most lucrative OPEC accounts.
>
> Shearman & Sterling did far more than just write legal briefs and
> shuttle down to Gitmo to conduct interviews about alleged torture for
> the BBC. In addition to its legal services, the firm registered as an
> agent of a foreign principal under the Foreign Agents Registration Act
> of 1938 (FARA) as well as the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (LDA) to
> press the Kuwaiti detainees' cause on Capitol Hill. Shearman reported
> $749,980 in lobbying fees under FARA for one six-month period in 2005
> and another $200,000 under the LDA over a one-year period between 2005
> and 2006. Those are the precise time periods when Congress was engaged
> in intense debates over the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military
> Commissions Act, legislation which Shearman & Sterling and its Kuwaiti
> paymasters hoped would pave the way for shutting down Guantanamo
> permanently and setting their clients free.
>
> Mr. Wilner, a media-savvy lawyer who immediately realized that the
> detainee cases posed a tremendous PR challenge in the wake of
> September 11, hired high-stakes media guru Richard Levick to change
> public perception about the Kuwaiti 12. Mr. Levick, a former attorney
> whose Washington, D.C.-based "crisis PR" firm has carved out a niche
> in litigation-related issues, has represented clients as varied as
> Rosie O'Donnell, Napster, and the Roman Catholic Church. Mr. Levick's
> firm is also registered under FARA as an agent of a foreign principal
> for the "Kuwaiti Detainees Committee," reporting $774,000 in fees in a
> one year period. After the U.S. Supreme Court heard the first
> consolidated case, the PR campaign went into high gear, Mr. Levick
> wrote, to "turn the Guantanamo tide."
>
> In numerous published articles and interviews, Mr. Levick has laid out
> the essence of the entire Kuwaiti PR campaign. The strategy sought to
> accomplish two things: put a sympathetic "human face" on the detainees
> and convince the public that it had a stake in their plight. In other
> words, the militant Islamists who traveled to Afghanistan to become a
> part of al Qaeda's jihad on America had to be reinvented as innocent
> charity workers swept up in the war after 9/11. The committed Islamist
> who admitted firing an AK-47 in a Taliban training camp became a
> "teacher on vacation" who went to Afghanistan in 2001 "to help
> refugees." The member of an Islamist street gang who opened three al-
> Wafa offices with Suliman Abu Ghaith (Osama Bin Laden's chief
> spokesman) to raise al Qaeda funds became a charity worker whose eight
> children were left destitute in his absence. All 12 Kuwaitis became
> the innocent victims of "bounty hunters."
>
> A Montreal-based marketing firm was hired to create the families' full-
> service Web site which fed propaganda -- unsourced, unrebutted and
> uninvestigated by the media -- aimed at the media all over the world.
> Creating what Mr. Levick calls a "war of pictures," the site is
> replete with images meant to appeal to Americans: smiling Kuwaiti
> families wearing T-shirts and baseball caps, cute children passing out
> yellow ribbons.
>
> After the Rasul decision, the PR momentum picked up speed and the
> Supreme Court became, in Mr. Levick's words, their "main weapon," a
> "cudgel" that forced more attention in what he calls the traditional
> "liberal" press. Dozens of op-eds by Mr. Wilner and the family group
> leader (described as a U.S.-trained former Kuwaiti Air Force pilot who
> cherishes the memory of drinking Coca Cola) were aimed at the public
> and Congress.
>
> Mr. Levick maintains that a year and a half after they began the
> campaign, their PR outreach produced literally thousands of news
> placements and that, eventually, a majority of the top 100 newspapers
> were editorializing on the detainees' behalf. Convinced that judges
> can be influenced by aggressive PR campaigns, Mr. Levick points to
> rulings in the detainee cases which openly cite news stories that
> resulted from his team's media outreach.
>
> The Kuwaiti 12 case is a primer on the anatomy of a guerilla PR
> offensive, packaged and sold to the public as a fight for the "rule of
> law" and "America's core principles." Begin with flimsy information,
> generate stories that are spun from uncorroborated double or triple
> hearsay uttered by interested parties that are hard to confirm from ...
>
> read more ?
Article is from Wall Street Journal's respected Opinion Journal.
Poster didn't write it.
> He was the first American to die in what some have called "the real
> war." Johnny "Mike" Spann, the 32-year-old CIA paramilitary commando,
> was interrogating prisoners in an open courtyard at the Qala-I-Jangi
> fortress in Afghanistan when the uprising of 538 hard-core Taliban and
> al Qaeda fighters began. Spann emptied his rifle, then his sidearm,
> then fought hand-to-hand as he was swarmed by raging prisoners
> screaming "Allahu akbar!"
>
> The bloody siege by Northern Alliance and U.S. forces went on for
> several days, only ending when 86 of the remaining jihadi fighters
> were smoked out of a basement where they had retreated and where they
> murdered a Red Cross worker who had gone in to check on their
> condition. Spann, a former Marine, is credited with saving the lives
> of countless Alliance fighters and Afghan civilians by standing and
> firing as they ran for cover. His beaten and booby-trapped body was
> recovered with two bullet wounds in his head, the angle of trajectory
> suggesting he had been shot execution style.
>
> One of the committed jihadis who came out of that basement, wounded
> and unrepentant, was "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, now serving
> a 20-year sentence in a federal prison. Another who was shot during
> the uprising and pulled out of the basement along with Lindh was
> Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi. Today, the 29-year-old is living
> somewhere in Kuwait, a free man.
>
> The true story of Mr. Mutairi's journey, from the uprising in Qala-I-
> Jangi to Guantanamo Bay's military detention camp to the privileged
> life of an affluent Kuwaiti citizen, is one that his team of high-
> priced lawyers and the government of Kuwait doesn't want you to know.
> His case reveals a disturbing counterpoint to the false narrative
> advanced by Gitmo lawyers and human-rights groups -- which holds that
> the Guantanamo Bay detainees are innocent victims of circumstance,
> swept up in the angry, anti-Muslim fervor that followed the attacks of
> September 11, then abused and brutally tortured at the hands of the
> U.S. military.
>
> Mr. Mutairi was among 12 Kuwaitis picked up in Afghanistan and
> detained at Guantanamo Bay in 2002. Their families retained Tom Wilner
> and the prestigious law firm of Shearman & Sterling early that same
> year. Arguably, it is Mr. Wilner's aggressive representation, along
> with the determined efforts of the Kuwait government, that has had the
> greatest influence in the outcome of all the enemy combatant cases, in
> the court of law and in the court of public opinion. The lawsuit filed
> on their behalf, renamed Rasul v. Bush when three cases were joined,
> is credited with opening the door for the blizzard of litigation that
> followed.
>
> According to Michael Ratner, the radical lawyer and head of the Center
> for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the center received 300 pieces of
> hate mail when the organization filed the very first Guantanamo
> detainee case in February of 2002. The shocking images of 9/11 were
> still fresh; it would be three more months until most human remains
> and rubble would be cleared from ground zero. There was no interest in
> Guantanamo from the lawyers at premium law firms.
>
> But by 2004, when the first of three detainee cases was heard by the
> U.S. Supreme Court, the national climate had changed. The country was
> politically divided, the presidential election was in full swing, and
> John Kerry was talking about treating terrorism like a criminal
> nuisance. The Guantanamo cases gave lawyers a chance to take a swipe
> at the president's policies, give heroic speeches about protecting the
> rights of indigents, and be a part of the kind of landmark legal cases
> that come along once in a lifetime. The Guantanamo Bay Bar increased
> from a lonely band of activist lawyers operating out of a run down
> office in Greenwich Village to an association of 500 lawyers. Said Mr.
> Ratner about the blue chip firms that initially shunned these cases,
> "You had to beat the lawyers off with a stick."
>
> Mr. Wilner and his colleagues at Shearman & Sterling were the
> exception, although he has been exceedingly coy about the true nature
> of his firm's role. Unlike the many lawyers who later joined in the
> litigation on a pro bono basis, Shearman & Sterling was handsomely
> paid. Mr. Wilner has repeatedly stated that the detainees' families
> insisted on paying Shearman & Sterling for its services and that the
> fees it earned have been donated to an unspecified 9/11-related
> charity. According to one news report, the families had spent $2
> million in legal fees by mid-2004. In truth, Kuwaiti officials
> confirmed that the government was footing the bills.
>
> How did Shearman & Sterling get tapped for this historic assignment?
> Speaking at Seton Hall Law School in fall of 2006, Mr. Wilner
> recounted that he visited the facility at Guantanamo Bay in 2002,
> months before he met the Kuwaiti 12's families. What was Mr. Wilner
> doing at Gitmo more than two years before Rasul established the legal
> basis for lawyers getting access to detainees inside the camp? One of
> his Gitmo legal colleagues has said that Mr. Wilner was brought into
> the case by an oil industry client.
>
> It turns out that Shearman & Sterling, a 1,000-lawyer firm with
> offices in 19 cities all over the world, has substantial business
> dealings on six continents. Indeed, Shearman's client care for Middle
> Eastern matters has established a new industry standard: The firm's
> Abu Dhabi office states that it has pioneered the concept of "Shariah-
> compliant" financing. In Kuwait, the firm has represented the
> government on a wide variety of matters involving billions of dollars
> worth of assets. So the party underwriting the litigation on behalf of
> the Kuwaiti 12 -- from which all of the detainees have benefited -- is
> one of Shearman & Sterling's most lucrative OPEC accounts.
>
> Shearman & Sterling did far more than just write legal briefs and
> shuttle down to Gitmo to conduct interviews about alleged torture for
> the BBC. In addition to its legal services, the firm registered as an
> agent of a foreign principal under the Foreign Agents Registration Act
> of 1938 (FARA) as well as the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (LDA) to
> press the Kuwaiti detainees' cause on Capitol Hill. Shearman reported
> $749,980 in lobbying fees under FARA for one six-month period in 2005
> and another $200,000 under the LDA over a one-year period between 2005
> and 2006. Those are the precise time periods when Congress was engaged
> in intense debates over the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military
> Commissions Act, legislation which Shearman & Sterling and its Kuwaiti
> paymasters hoped would pave the way for shutting down Guantanamo
> permanently and setting their clients free.
>
> Mr. Wilner, a media-savvy lawyer who immediately realized that the
> detainee cases posed a tremendous PR challenge in the wake of
> September 11, hired high-stakes media guru Richard Levick to change
> public perception about the Kuwaiti 12. Mr. Levick, a former attorney
> whose Washington, D.C.-based "crisis PR" firm has carved out a niche
> in litigation-related issues, has represented clients as varied as
> Rosie O'Donnell, Napster, and the Roman Catholic Church. Mr. Levick's
> firm is also registered under FARA as an agent of a foreign principal
> for the "Kuwaiti Detainees Committee," reporting $774,000 in fees in a
> one year period. After the U.S. Supreme Court heard the first
> consolidated case, the PR campaign went into high gear, Mr. Levick
> wrote, to "turn the Guantanamo tide."
>
> In numerous published articles and interviews, Mr. Levick has laid out
> the essence of the entire Kuwaiti PR campaign. The strategy sought to
> accomplish two things: put a sympathetic "human face" on the detainees
> and convince the public that it had a stake in their plight. In other
> words, the militant Islamists who traveled to Afghanistan to become a
> part of al Qaeda's jihad on America had to be reinvented as innocent
> charity workers swept up in the war after 9/11. The committed Islamist
> who admitted firing an AK-47 in a Taliban training camp became a
> "teacher on vacation" who went to Afghanistan in 2001 "to help
> refugees." The member of an Islamist street gang who opened three al-
> Wafa offices with Suliman Abu Ghaith (Osama Bin Laden's chief
> spokesman) to raise al Qaeda funds became a charity worker whose eight
> children were left destitute in his absence. All 12 Kuwaitis became
> the innocent victims of "bounty hunters."
>
> A Montreal-based marketing firm was hired to create the families' full-
> service Web site which fed propaganda -- unsourced, unrebutted and
> uninvestigated by the media -- aimed at the media all over the world.
> Creating what Mr. Levick calls a "war of pictures," the site is
> replete with images meant to appeal to Americans: smiling Kuwaiti
> families wearing T-shirts and baseball caps, cute children passing out
> yellow ribbons.
>
> After the Rasul decision, the PR momentum picked up speed and the
> Supreme Court became, in Mr. Levick's words, their "main weapon," a
> "cudgel" that forced more attention in what he calls the traditional
> "liberal" press. Dozens of op-eds by Mr. Wilner and the family group
> leader (described as a U.S.-trained former Kuwaiti Air Force pilot who
> cherishes the memory of drinking Coca Cola) were aimed at the public
> and Congress.
>
> Mr. Levick maintains that a year and a half after they began the
> campaign, their PR outreach produced literally thousands of news
> placements and that, eventually, a majority of the top 100 newspapers
> were editorializing on the detainees' behalf. Convinced that judges
> can be influenced by aggressive PR campaigns, Mr. Levick points to
> rulings in the detainee cases which openly cite news stories that
> resulted from his team's media outreach.
>
> The Kuwaiti 12 case is a primer on the anatomy of a guerilla PR
> offensive, packaged and sold to the public as a fight for the "rule of
> law" and "America's core principles." Begin with flimsy information,
> generate stories that are spun from uncorroborated double or triple
> hearsay uttered by interested parties that are hard to confirm from ...
>
> read more ?
Article is from Wall Street Journal's respected Opinion Journal.
Poster didn't write it.
Mar 8th 2007, 7:26 pm
#4
Guest
Posts: n/a
Re: Gitmo's Guerrilla Lawyers
On 9/03/07 7:25, in article
[email protected]. com, "zorba"
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Article is from Wall Street Journal's respected Opinion Journal.
> Poster didn't write it.
>
It was forged in my name by Stephen Bach who has repeated the same
offense a number of times, including putting my name as author
on some of the items. This offense has been repeated by him
over 20 times.
His offenses have been reported both to the WSJ, which we
are subscribers too and to the FBI via their internet
service. http://www.ic3.gov/ If they do nothing
that is their problem. Filing a complaint requires
your saying who you are, address, phone number etc,
which is no problem with me, since
I have always used my real name on the internet
Having one's name attached to a forgery does not provoke
any problems with the victim (myself) since proof
in the identity of the poster is found via the ISP
and/or service provider.
Finally, Bach posts WSJ op-ed pieces because he knows
I have a low opinion of that particular part of
the WSJ. That is to say I don't "respect" it at all!
I call it the "whore house page" of American journalism.
However, in the body of the WSJ you have first class
articles by their reporters which makes the WSJ, overall
respectable, in spite of having a whore in the family!
[email protected]. com, "zorba"
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Article is from Wall Street Journal's respected Opinion Journal.
> Poster didn't write it.
>
It was forged in my name by Stephen Bach who has repeated the same
offense a number of times, including putting my name as author
on some of the items. This offense has been repeated by him
over 20 times.
His offenses have been reported both to the WSJ, which we
are subscribers too and to the FBI via their internet
service. http://www.ic3.gov/ If they do nothing
that is their problem. Filing a complaint requires
your saying who you are, address, phone number etc,
which is no problem with me, since
I have always used my real name on the internet
Having one's name attached to a forgery does not provoke
any problems with the victim (myself) since proof
in the identity of the poster is found via the ISP
and/or service provider.
Finally, Bach posts WSJ op-ed pieces because he knows
I have a low opinion of that particular part of
the WSJ. That is to say I don't "respect" it at all!
I call it the "whore house page" of American journalism.
However, in the body of the WSJ you have first class
articles by their reporters which makes the WSJ, overall
respectable, in spite of having a whore in the family!
Mar 8th 2007, 7:54 pm
#5
Guest
Posts: n/a
Re: Gitmo's Guerrilla Lawyers
"zorba" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected] oups.com...
On Mar 8, 3:59?am, "Earl Evleth" <[email protected]> wrote:
> He was the first American to die in what some have called "the real
> war." Johnny "Mike" Spann, the 32-year-old CIA paramilitary commando,
> was interrogating prisoners in an open courtyard at the Qala-I-Jangi
> fortress in Afghanistan when the uprising of 538 hard-core Taliban and
> al Qaeda fighters began. Spann emptied his rifle, then his sidearm,
> then fought hand-to-hand as he was swarmed by raging prisoners
> screaming "Allahu akbar!"
>
> The bloody siege by Northern Alliance and U.S. forces went on for
> several days, only ending when 86 of the remaining jihadi fighters
> were smoked out of a basement where they had retreated and where they
> murdered a Red Cross worker who had gone in to check on their
> condition. Spann, a former Marine, is credited with saving the lives
> of countless Alliance fighters and Afghan civilians by standing and
> firing as they ran for cover. His beaten and booby-trapped body was
> recovered with two bullet wounds in his head, the angle of trajectory
> suggesting he had been shot execution style.
>
> One of the committed jihadis who came out of that basement, wounded
> and unrepentant, was "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, now serving
> a 20-year sentence in a federal prison. Another who was shot during
> the uprising and pulled out of the basement along with Lindh was
> Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi. Today, the 29-year-old is living
> somewhere in Kuwait, a free man.
>
> The true story of Mr. Mutairi's journey, from the uprising in Qala-I-
> Jangi to Guantanamo Bay's military detention camp to the privileged
> life of an affluent Kuwaiti citizen, is one that his team of high-
> priced lawyers and the government of Kuwait doesn't want you to know.
> His case reveals a disturbing counterpoint to the false narrative
> advanced by Gitmo lawyers and human-rights groups -- which holds that
> the Guantanamo Bay detainees are innocent victims of circumstance,
> swept up in the angry, anti-Muslim fervor that followed the attacks of
> September 11, then abused and brutally tortured at the hands of the
> U.S. military.
>
> Mr. Mutairi was among 12 Kuwaitis picked up in Afghanistan and
> detained at Guantanamo Bay in 2002. Their families retained Tom Wilner
> and the prestigious law firm of Shearman & Sterling early that same
> year. Arguably, it is Mr. Wilner's aggressive representation, along
> with the determined efforts of the Kuwait government, that has had the
> greatest influence in the outcome of all the enemy combatant cases, in
> the court of law and in the court of public opinion. The lawsuit filed
> on their behalf, renamed Rasul v. Bush when three cases were joined,
> is credited with opening the door for the blizzard of litigation that
> followed.
>
> According to Michael Ratner, the radical lawyer and head of the Center
> for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the center received 300 pieces of
> hate mail when the organization filed the very first Guantanamo
> detainee case in February of 2002. The shocking images of 9/11 were
> still fresh; it would be three more months until most human remains
> and rubble would be cleared from ground zero. There was no interest in
> Guantanamo from the lawyers at premium law firms.
>
> But by 2004, when the first of three detainee cases was heard by the
> U.S. Supreme Court, the national climate had changed. The country was
> politically divided, the presidential election was in full swing, and
> John Kerry was talking about treating terrorism like a criminal
> nuisance. The Guantanamo cases gave lawyers a chance to take a swipe
> at the president's policies, give heroic speeches about protecting the
> rights of indigents, and be a part of the kind of landmark legal cases
> that come along once in a lifetime. The Guantanamo Bay Bar increased
> from a lonely band of activist lawyers operating out of a run down
> office in Greenwich Village to an association of 500 lawyers. Said Mr.
> Ratner about the blue chip firms that initially shunned these cases,
> "You had to beat the lawyers off with a stick."
>
> Mr. Wilner and his colleagues at Shearman & Sterling were the
> exception, although he has been exceedingly coy about the true nature
> of his firm's role. Unlike the many lawyers who later joined in the
> litigation on a pro bono basis, Shearman & Sterling was handsomely
> paid. Mr. Wilner has repeatedly stated that the detainees' families
> insisted on paying Shearman & Sterling for its services and that the
> fees it earned have been donated to an unspecified 9/11-related
> charity. According to one news report, the families had spent $2
> million in legal fees by mid-2004. In truth, Kuwaiti officials
> confirmed that the government was footing the bills.
>
> How did Shearman & Sterling get tapped for this historic assignment?
> Speaking at Seton Hall Law School in fall of 2006, Mr. Wilner
> recounted that he visited the facility at Guantanamo Bay in 2002,
> months before he met the Kuwaiti 12's families. What was Mr. Wilner
> doing at Gitmo more than two years before Rasul established the legal
> basis for lawyers getting access to detainees inside the camp? One of
> his Gitmo legal colleagues has said that Mr. Wilner was brought into
> the case by an oil industry client.
>
> It turns out that Shearman & Sterling, a 1,000-lawyer firm with
> offices in 19 cities all over the world, has substantial business
> dealings on six continents. Indeed, Shearman's client care for Middle
> Eastern matters has established a new industry standard: The firm's
> Abu Dhabi office states that it has pioneered the concept of "Shariah-
> compliant" financing. In Kuwait, the firm has represented the
> government on a wide variety of matters involving billions of dollars
> worth of assets. So the party underwriting the litigation on behalf of
> the Kuwaiti 12 -- from which all of the detainees have benefited -- is
> one of Shearman & Sterling's most lucrative OPEC accounts.
>
> Shearman & Sterling did far more than just write legal briefs and
> shuttle down to Gitmo to conduct interviews about alleged torture for
> the BBC. In addition to its legal services, the firm registered as an
> agent of a foreign principal under the Foreign Agents Registration Act
> of 1938 (FARA) as well as the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (LDA) to
> press the Kuwaiti detainees' cause on Capitol Hill. Shearman reported
> $749,980 in lobbying fees under FARA for one six-month period in 2005
> and another $200,000 under the LDA over a one-year period between 2005
> and 2006. Those are the precise time periods when Congress was engaged
> in intense debates over the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military
> Commissions Act, legislation which Shearman & Sterling and its Kuwaiti
> paymasters hoped would pave the way for shutting down Guantanamo
> permanently and setting their clients free.
>
> Mr. Wilner, a media-savvy lawyer who immediately realized that the
> detainee cases posed a tremendous PR challenge in the wake of
> September 11, hired high-stakes media guru Richard Levick to change
> public perception about the Kuwaiti 12. Mr. Levick, a former attorney
> whose Washington, D.C.-based "crisis PR" firm has carved out a niche
> in litigation-related issues, has represented clients as varied as
> Rosie O'Donnell, Napster, and the Roman Catholic Church. Mr. Levick's
> firm is also registered under FARA as an agent of a foreign principal
> for the "Kuwaiti Detainees Committee," reporting $774,000 in fees in a
> one year period. After the U.S. Supreme Court heard the first
> consolidated case, the PR campaign went into high gear, Mr. Levick
> wrote, to "turn the Guantanamo tide."
>
> In numerous published articles and interviews, Mr. Levick has laid out
> the essence of the entire Kuwaiti PR campaign. The strategy sought to
> accomplish two things: put a sympathetic "human face" on the detainees
> and convince the public that it had a stake in their plight. In other
> words, the militant Islamists who traveled to Afghanistan to become a
> part of al Qaeda's jihad on America had to be reinvented as innocent
> charity workers swept up in the war after 9/11. The committed Islamist
> who admitted firing an AK-47 in a Taliban training camp became a
> "teacher on vacation" who went to Afghanistan in 2001 "to help
> refugees." The member of an Islamist street gang who opened three al-
> Wafa offices with Suliman Abu Ghaith (Osama Bin Laden's chief
> spokesman) to raise al Qaeda funds became a charity worker whose eight
> children were left destitute in his absence. All 12 Kuwaitis became
> the innocent victims of "bounty hunters."
>
> A Montreal-based marketing firm was hired to create the families' full-
> service Web site which fed propaganda -- unsourced, unrebutted and
> uninvestigated by the media -- aimed at the media all over the world.
> Creating what Mr. Levick calls a "war of pictures," the site is
> replete with images meant to appeal to Americans: smiling Kuwaiti
> families wearing T-shirts and baseball caps, cute children passing out
> yellow ribbons.
>
> After the Rasul decision, the PR momentum picked up speed and the
> Supreme Court became, in Mr. Levick's words, their "main weapon," a
> "cudgel" that forced more attention in what he calls the traditional
> "liberal" press. Dozens of op-eds by Mr. Wilner and the family group
> leader (described as a U.S.-trained former Kuwaiti Air Force pilot who
> cherishes the memory of drinking Coca Cola) were aimed at the public
> and Congress.
>
> Mr. Levick maintains that a year and a half after they began the
> campaign, their PR outreach produced literally thousands of news
> placements and that, eventually, a majority of the top 100 newspapers
> were editorializing on the detainees' behalf. Convinced that judges
> can be influenced by aggressive PR campaigns, Mr. Levick points to
> rulings in the detainee cases which openly cite news stories that
> resulted from his team's media outreach.
>
> The Kuwaiti 12 case is a primer on the anatomy of a guerilla PR
> offensive, packaged and sold to the public as a fight for the "rule of
> law" and "America's core principles." Begin with flimsy information,
> generate stories that are spun from uncorroborated double or triple
> hearsay uttered by interested parties that are hard to confirm from ...
>
> read more
Article is from Wall Street Journal's respected Opinion Journal.
Poster didn't write it.
And the lying crooked poster, Stephen Bach, forged another's address anyway.
news:[email protected] oups.com...
On Mar 8, 3:59?am, "Earl Evleth" <[email protected]> wrote:
> He was the first American to die in what some have called "the real
> war." Johnny "Mike" Spann, the 32-year-old CIA paramilitary commando,
> was interrogating prisoners in an open courtyard at the Qala-I-Jangi
> fortress in Afghanistan when the uprising of 538 hard-core Taliban and
> al Qaeda fighters began. Spann emptied his rifle, then his sidearm,
> then fought hand-to-hand as he was swarmed by raging prisoners
> screaming "Allahu akbar!"
>
> The bloody siege by Northern Alliance and U.S. forces went on for
> several days, only ending when 86 of the remaining jihadi fighters
> were smoked out of a basement where they had retreated and where they
> murdered a Red Cross worker who had gone in to check on their
> condition. Spann, a former Marine, is credited with saving the lives
> of countless Alliance fighters and Afghan civilians by standing and
> firing as they ran for cover. His beaten and booby-trapped body was
> recovered with two bullet wounds in his head, the angle of trajectory
> suggesting he had been shot execution style.
>
> One of the committed jihadis who came out of that basement, wounded
> and unrepentant, was "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, now serving
> a 20-year sentence in a federal prison. Another who was shot during
> the uprising and pulled out of the basement along with Lindh was
> Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi. Today, the 29-year-old is living
> somewhere in Kuwait, a free man.
>
> The true story of Mr. Mutairi's journey, from the uprising in Qala-I-
> Jangi to Guantanamo Bay's military detention camp to the privileged
> life of an affluent Kuwaiti citizen, is one that his team of high-
> priced lawyers and the government of Kuwait doesn't want you to know.
> His case reveals a disturbing counterpoint to the false narrative
> advanced by Gitmo lawyers and human-rights groups -- which holds that
> the Guantanamo Bay detainees are innocent victims of circumstance,
> swept up in the angry, anti-Muslim fervor that followed the attacks of
> September 11, then abused and brutally tortured at the hands of the
> U.S. military.
>
> Mr. Mutairi was among 12 Kuwaitis picked up in Afghanistan and
> detained at Guantanamo Bay in 2002. Their families retained Tom Wilner
> and the prestigious law firm of Shearman & Sterling early that same
> year. Arguably, it is Mr. Wilner's aggressive representation, along
> with the determined efforts of the Kuwait government, that has had the
> greatest influence in the outcome of all the enemy combatant cases, in
> the court of law and in the court of public opinion. The lawsuit filed
> on their behalf, renamed Rasul v. Bush when three cases were joined,
> is credited with opening the door for the blizzard of litigation that
> followed.
>
> According to Michael Ratner, the radical lawyer and head of the Center
> for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the center received 300 pieces of
> hate mail when the organization filed the very first Guantanamo
> detainee case in February of 2002. The shocking images of 9/11 were
> still fresh; it would be three more months until most human remains
> and rubble would be cleared from ground zero. There was no interest in
> Guantanamo from the lawyers at premium law firms.
>
> But by 2004, when the first of three detainee cases was heard by the
> U.S. Supreme Court, the national climate had changed. The country was
> politically divided, the presidential election was in full swing, and
> John Kerry was talking about treating terrorism like a criminal
> nuisance. The Guantanamo cases gave lawyers a chance to take a swipe
> at the president's policies, give heroic speeches about protecting the
> rights of indigents, and be a part of the kind of landmark legal cases
> that come along once in a lifetime. The Guantanamo Bay Bar increased
> from a lonely band of activist lawyers operating out of a run down
> office in Greenwich Village to an association of 500 lawyers. Said Mr.
> Ratner about the blue chip firms that initially shunned these cases,
> "You had to beat the lawyers off with a stick."
>
> Mr. Wilner and his colleagues at Shearman & Sterling were the
> exception, although he has been exceedingly coy about the true nature
> of his firm's role. Unlike the many lawyers who later joined in the
> litigation on a pro bono basis, Shearman & Sterling was handsomely
> paid. Mr. Wilner has repeatedly stated that the detainees' families
> insisted on paying Shearman & Sterling for its services and that the
> fees it earned have been donated to an unspecified 9/11-related
> charity. According to one news report, the families had spent $2
> million in legal fees by mid-2004. In truth, Kuwaiti officials
> confirmed that the government was footing the bills.
>
> How did Shearman & Sterling get tapped for this historic assignment?
> Speaking at Seton Hall Law School in fall of 2006, Mr. Wilner
> recounted that he visited the facility at Guantanamo Bay in 2002,
> months before he met the Kuwaiti 12's families. What was Mr. Wilner
> doing at Gitmo more than two years before Rasul established the legal
> basis for lawyers getting access to detainees inside the camp? One of
> his Gitmo legal colleagues has said that Mr. Wilner was brought into
> the case by an oil industry client.
>
> It turns out that Shearman & Sterling, a 1,000-lawyer firm with
> offices in 19 cities all over the world, has substantial business
> dealings on six continents. Indeed, Shearman's client care for Middle
> Eastern matters has established a new industry standard: The firm's
> Abu Dhabi office states that it has pioneered the concept of "Shariah-
> compliant" financing. In Kuwait, the firm has represented the
> government on a wide variety of matters involving billions of dollars
> worth of assets. So the party underwriting the litigation on behalf of
> the Kuwaiti 12 -- from which all of the detainees have benefited -- is
> one of Shearman & Sterling's most lucrative OPEC accounts.
>
> Shearman & Sterling did far more than just write legal briefs and
> shuttle down to Gitmo to conduct interviews about alleged torture for
> the BBC. In addition to its legal services, the firm registered as an
> agent of a foreign principal under the Foreign Agents Registration Act
> of 1938 (FARA) as well as the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (LDA) to
> press the Kuwaiti detainees' cause on Capitol Hill. Shearman reported
> $749,980 in lobbying fees under FARA for one six-month period in 2005
> and another $200,000 under the LDA over a one-year period between 2005
> and 2006. Those are the precise time periods when Congress was engaged
> in intense debates over the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military
> Commissions Act, legislation which Shearman & Sterling and its Kuwaiti
> paymasters hoped would pave the way for shutting down Guantanamo
> permanently and setting their clients free.
>
> Mr. Wilner, a media-savvy lawyer who immediately realized that the
> detainee cases posed a tremendous PR challenge in the wake of
> September 11, hired high-stakes media guru Richard Levick to change
> public perception about the Kuwaiti 12. Mr. Levick, a former attorney
> whose Washington, D.C.-based "crisis PR" firm has carved out a niche
> in litigation-related issues, has represented clients as varied as
> Rosie O'Donnell, Napster, and the Roman Catholic Church. Mr. Levick's
> firm is also registered under FARA as an agent of a foreign principal
> for the "Kuwaiti Detainees Committee," reporting $774,000 in fees in a
> one year period. After the U.S. Supreme Court heard the first
> consolidated case, the PR campaign went into high gear, Mr. Levick
> wrote, to "turn the Guantanamo tide."
>
> In numerous published articles and interviews, Mr. Levick has laid out
> the essence of the entire Kuwaiti PR campaign. The strategy sought to
> accomplish two things: put a sympathetic "human face" on the detainees
> and convince the public that it had a stake in their plight. In other
> words, the militant Islamists who traveled to Afghanistan to become a
> part of al Qaeda's jihad on America had to be reinvented as innocent
> charity workers swept up in the war after 9/11. The committed Islamist
> who admitted firing an AK-47 in a Taliban training camp became a
> "teacher on vacation" who went to Afghanistan in 2001 "to help
> refugees." The member of an Islamist street gang who opened three al-
> Wafa offices with Suliman Abu Ghaith (Osama Bin Laden's chief
> spokesman) to raise al Qaeda funds became a charity worker whose eight
> children were left destitute in his absence. All 12 Kuwaitis became
> the innocent victims of "bounty hunters."
>
> A Montreal-based marketing firm was hired to create the families' full-
> service Web site which fed propaganda -- unsourced, unrebutted and
> uninvestigated by the media -- aimed at the media all over the world.
> Creating what Mr. Levick calls a "war of pictures," the site is
> replete with images meant to appeal to Americans: smiling Kuwaiti
> families wearing T-shirts and baseball caps, cute children passing out
> yellow ribbons.
>
> After the Rasul decision, the PR momentum picked up speed and the
> Supreme Court became, in Mr. Levick's words, their "main weapon," a
> "cudgel" that forced more attention in what he calls the traditional
> "liberal" press. Dozens of op-eds by Mr. Wilner and the family group
> leader (described as a U.S.-trained former Kuwaiti Air Force pilot who
> cherishes the memory of drinking Coca Cola) were aimed at the public
> and Congress.
>
> Mr. Levick maintains that a year and a half after they began the
> campaign, their PR outreach produced literally thousands of news
> placements and that, eventually, a majority of the top 100 newspapers
> were editorializing on the detainees' behalf. Convinced that judges
> can be influenced by aggressive PR campaigns, Mr. Levick points to
> rulings in the detainee cases which openly cite news stories that
> resulted from his team's media outreach.
>
> The Kuwaiti 12 case is a primer on the anatomy of a guerilla PR
> offensive, packaged and sold to the public as a fight for the "rule of
> law" and "America's core principles." Begin with flimsy information,
> generate stories that are spun from uncorroborated double or triple
> hearsay uttered by interested parties that are hard to confirm from ...
>
> read more
Article is from Wall Street Journal's respected Opinion Journal.
Poster didn't write it.
And the lying crooked poster, Stephen Bach, forged another's address anyway.
Mar 17th 2007, 3:34 pm
#6
Guest
Posts: n/a
Re: Gitmo's Guerrilla Lawyers
"Earl Evleth" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected] oups.com...
> He was the first American to die in what some have called "the real
> war."
And responsible for Earl having one of his gigantic orgasms.
<clipped>
Planet Visitor II
Official publisher of AADP Official dictionary
http://www.planetvisitor.name/dictionary.htm
news:[email protected] oups.com...
> He was the first American to die in what some have called "the real
> war."
And responsible for Earl having one of his gigantic orgasms.
<clipped>
Planet Visitor II
Official publisher of AADP Official dictionary
http://www.planetvisitor.name/dictionary.htm
Mar 18th 2007, 12:18 am
#7
Guest
Posts: n/a
Re: OT: Re: Gitmo's Guerrilla Lawyers
On Mar 8, 4:59 am, "Earl Evleth" <[email protected]> wrote:
> He was the first American to die in what some have called "the real
> war." Johnny "Mike" Spann, the 32-year-old CIA paramilitary commando,
> was interrogating prisoners in an open courtyard at the Qala-I-Jangi
> fortress in Afghanistan when the uprising of 538 hard-core Taliban and
> al Qaeda fighters began. Spann emptied his rifle, then his sidearm,
> then fought hand-to-hand as he was swarmed by raging prisoners
> screaming "Allahu akbar!"
>
> The bloody siege by Northern Alliance and U.S. forces went on for
> several days, only ending when 86 of the remaining jihadi fighters
> were smoked out of a basement where they had retreated and where they
> murdered a Red Cross worker who had gone in to check on their
> condition. Spann, a former Marine, is credited with saving the lives
> of countless Alliance fighters and Afghan civilians by standing and
> firing as they ran for cover. His beaten and booby-trapped body was
> recovered with two bullet wounds in his head, the angle of trajectory
> suggesting he had been shot execution style.
>
> One of the committed jihadis who came out of that basement, wounded
> and unrepentant, was "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, now serving
> a 20-year sentence in a federal prison. Another who was shot during
> the uprising and pulled out of the basement along with Lindh was
> Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi. Today, the 29-year-old is living
> somewhere in Kuwait, a free man.
>
> The true story of Mr. Mutairi's journey, from the uprising in Qala-I-
> Jangi to Guantanamo Bay's military detention camp to the privileged
> life of an affluent Kuwaiti citizen, is one that his team of high-
> priced lawyers and the government of Kuwait doesn't want you to know.
> His case reveals a disturbing counterpoint to the false narrative
> advanced by Gitmo lawyers and human-rights groups -- which holds that
> the Guantanamo Bay detainees are innocent victims of circumstance,
> swept up in the angry, anti-Muslim fervor that followed the attacks of
> September 11, then abused and brutally tortured at the hands of the
> U.S. military.
>
> Mr. Mutairi was among 12 Kuwaitis picked up in Afghanistan and
> detained at Guantanamo Bay in 2002. Their families retained Tom Wilner
> and the prestigious law firm of Shearman & Sterling early that same
> year. Arguably, it is Mr. Wilner's aggressive representation, along
> with the determined efforts of the Kuwait government, that has had the
> greatest influence in the outcome of all the enemy combatant cases, in
> the court of law and in the court of public opinion. The lawsuit filed
> on their behalf, renamed Rasul v. Bush when three cases were joined,
> is credited with opening the door for the blizzard of litigation that
> followed.
>
> According to Michael Ratner, the radical lawyer and head of the Center
> for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the center received 300 pieces of
> hate mail when the organization filed the very first Guantanamo
> detainee case in February of 2002. The shocking images of 9/11 were
> still fresh; it would be three more months until most human remains
> and rubble would be cleared from ground zero. There was no interest in
> Guantanamo from the lawyers at premium law firms.
>
> But by 2004, when the first of three detainee cases was heard by the
> U.S. Supreme Court, the national climate had changed. The country was
> politically divided, the presidential election was in full swing, and
> John Kerry was talking about treating terrorism like a criminal
> nuisance. The Guantanamo cases gave lawyers a chance to take a swipe
> at the president's policies, give heroic speeches about protecting the
> rights of indigents, and be a part of the kind of landmark legal cases
> that come along once in a lifetime. The Guantanamo Bay Bar increased
> from a lonely band of activist lawyers operating out of a run down
> office in Greenwich Village to an association of 500 lawyers. Said Mr.
> Ratner about the blue chip firms that initially shunned these cases,
> "You had to beat the lawyers off with a stick."
>
> Mr. Wilner and his colleagues at Shearman & Sterling were the
> exception, although he has been exceedingly coy about the true nature
> of his firm's role. Unlike the many lawyers who later joined in the
> litigation on a pro bono basis, Shearman & Sterling was handsomely
> paid. Mr. Wilner has repeatedly stated that the detainees' families
> insisted on paying Shearman & Sterling for its services and that the
> fees it earned have been donated to an unspecified 9/11-related
> charity. According to one news report, the families had spent $2
> million in legal fees by mid-2004. In truth, Kuwaiti officials
> confirmed that the government was footing the bills.
>
> How did Shearman & Sterling get tapped for this historic assignment?
> Speaking at Seton Hall Law School in fall of 2006, Mr. Wilner
> recounted that he visited the facility at Guantanamo Bay in 2002,
> months before he met the Kuwaiti 12's families. What was Mr. Wilner
> doing at Gitmo more than two years before Rasul established the legal
> basis for lawyers getting access to detainees inside the camp? One of
> his Gitmo legal colleagues has said that Mr. Wilner was brought into
> the case by an oil industry client.
>
> It turns out that Shearman & Sterling, a 1,000-lawyer firm with
> offices in 19 cities all over the world, has substantial business
> dealings on six continents. Indeed, Shearman's client care for Middle
> Eastern matters has established a new industry standard: The firm's
> Abu Dhabi office states that it has pioneered the concept of "Shariah-
> compliant" financing. In Kuwait, the firm has represented the
> government on a wide variety of matters involving billions of dollars
> worth of assets. So the party underwriting the litigation on behalf of
> the Kuwaiti 12 -- from which all of the detainees have benefited -- is
> one of Shearman & Sterling's most lucrative OPEC accounts.
>
> Shearman & Sterling did far more than just write legal briefs and
> shuttle down to Gitmo to conduct interviews about alleged torture for
> the BBC. In addition to its legal services, the firm registered as an
> agent of a foreign principal under the Foreign Agents Registration Act
> of 1938 (FARA) as well as the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (LDA) to
> press the Kuwaiti detainees' cause on Capitol Hill. Shearman reported
> $749,980 in lobbying fees under FARA for one six-month period in 2005
> and another $200,000 under the LDA over a one-year period between 2005
> and 2006. Those are the precise time periods when Congress was engaged
> in intense debates over the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military
> Commissions Act, legislation which Shearman & Sterling and its Kuwaiti
> paymasters hoped would pave the way for shutting down Guantanamo
> permanently and setting their clients free.
>
> Mr. Wilner, a media-savvy lawyer who immediately realized that the
> detainee cases posed a tremendous PR challenge in the wake of
> September 11, hired high-stakes media guru Richard Levick to change
> public perception about the Kuwaiti 12. Mr. Levick, a former attorney
> whose Washington, D.C.-based "crisis PR" firm has carved out a niche
> in litigation-related issues, has represented clients as varied as
> Rosie O'Donnell, Napster, and the Roman Catholic Church. Mr. Levick's
> firm is also registered under FARA as an agent of a foreign principal
> for the "Kuwaiti Detainees Committee," reporting $774,000 in fees in a
> one year period. After the U.S. Supreme Court heard the first
> consolidated case, the PR campaign went into high gear, Mr. Levick
> wrote, to "turn the Guantanamo tide."
>
> In numerous published articles and interviews, Mr. Levick has laid out
> the essence of the entire Kuwaiti PR campaign. The strategy sought to
> accomplish two things: put a sympathetic "human face" on the detainees
> and convince the public that it had a stake in their plight. In other
> words, the militant Islamists who traveled to Afghanistan to become a
> part of al Qaeda's jihad on America had to be reinvented as innocent
> charity workers swept up in the war after 9/11. The committed Islamist
> who admitted firing an AK-47 in a Taliban training camp became a
> "teacher on vacation" who went to Afghanistan in 2001 "to help
> refugees." The member of an Islamist street gang who opened three al-
> Wafa offices with Suliman Abu Ghaith (Osama Bin Laden's chief
> spokesman) to raise al Qaeda funds became a charity worker whose eight
> children were left destitute in his absence. All 12 Kuwaitis became
> the innocent victims of "bounty hunters."
>
> A Montreal-based marketing firm was hired to create the families' full-
> service Web site which fed propaganda -- unsourced, unrebutted and
> uninvestigated by the media -- aimed at the media all over the world.
> Creating what Mr. Levick calls a "war of pictures," the site is
> replete with images meant to appeal to Americans: smiling Kuwaiti
> families wearing T-shirts and baseball caps, cute children passing out
> yellow ribbons.
>
> After the Rasul decision, the PR momentum picked up speed and the
> Supreme Court became, in Mr. Levick's words, their "main weapon," a
> "cudgel" that forced more attention in what he calls the traditional
> "liberal" press. Dozens of op-eds by Mr. Wilner and the family group
> leader (described as a U.S.-trained former Kuwaiti Air Force pilot who
> cherishes the memory of drinking Coca Cola) were aimed at the public
> and Congress.
>
> Mr. Levick maintains that a year and a half after they began the
> campaign, their PR outreach produced literally thousands of news
> placements and that, eventually, a majority of the top 100 newspapers
> were editorializing on the detainees' behalf. Convinced that judges
> can be influenced by aggressive PR campaigns, Mr. Levick points to
> rulings in the detainee cases which openly cite news stories that
> resulted from his team's media outreach.
>
> The Kuwaiti 12 case is a primer on the anatomy of a guerilla PR
> offensive, packaged and sold to the public as a fight for the "rule of
> law" and "America's core principles." Begin with flimsy information,
> generate stories that are spun from uncorroborated double or triple
> hearsay uttered by interested parties that are hard to confirm from ...
>
> read more �
Use "OT:" in subjects for this crap on non-political groups.
> He was the first American to die in what some have called "the real
> war." Johnny "Mike" Spann, the 32-year-old CIA paramilitary commando,
> was interrogating prisoners in an open courtyard at the Qala-I-Jangi
> fortress in Afghanistan when the uprising of 538 hard-core Taliban and
> al Qaeda fighters began. Spann emptied his rifle, then his sidearm,
> then fought hand-to-hand as he was swarmed by raging prisoners
> screaming "Allahu akbar!"
>
> The bloody siege by Northern Alliance and U.S. forces went on for
> several days, only ending when 86 of the remaining jihadi fighters
> were smoked out of a basement where they had retreated and where they
> murdered a Red Cross worker who had gone in to check on their
> condition. Spann, a former Marine, is credited with saving the lives
> of countless Alliance fighters and Afghan civilians by standing and
> firing as they ran for cover. His beaten and booby-trapped body was
> recovered with two bullet wounds in his head, the angle of trajectory
> suggesting he had been shot execution style.
>
> One of the committed jihadis who came out of that basement, wounded
> and unrepentant, was "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, now serving
> a 20-year sentence in a federal prison. Another who was shot during
> the uprising and pulled out of the basement along with Lindh was
> Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi. Today, the 29-year-old is living
> somewhere in Kuwait, a free man.
>
> The true story of Mr. Mutairi's journey, from the uprising in Qala-I-
> Jangi to Guantanamo Bay's military detention camp to the privileged
> life of an affluent Kuwaiti citizen, is one that his team of high-
> priced lawyers and the government of Kuwait doesn't want you to know.
> His case reveals a disturbing counterpoint to the false narrative
> advanced by Gitmo lawyers and human-rights groups -- which holds that
> the Guantanamo Bay detainees are innocent victims of circumstance,
> swept up in the angry, anti-Muslim fervor that followed the attacks of
> September 11, then abused and brutally tortured at the hands of the
> U.S. military.
>
> Mr. Mutairi was among 12 Kuwaitis picked up in Afghanistan and
> detained at Guantanamo Bay in 2002. Their families retained Tom Wilner
> and the prestigious law firm of Shearman & Sterling early that same
> year. Arguably, it is Mr. Wilner's aggressive representation, along
> with the determined efforts of the Kuwait government, that has had the
> greatest influence in the outcome of all the enemy combatant cases, in
> the court of law and in the court of public opinion. The lawsuit filed
> on their behalf, renamed Rasul v. Bush when three cases were joined,
> is credited with opening the door for the blizzard of litigation that
> followed.
>
> According to Michael Ratner, the radical lawyer and head of the Center
> for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the center received 300 pieces of
> hate mail when the organization filed the very first Guantanamo
> detainee case in February of 2002. The shocking images of 9/11 were
> still fresh; it would be three more months until most human remains
> and rubble would be cleared from ground zero. There was no interest in
> Guantanamo from the lawyers at premium law firms.
>
> But by 2004, when the first of three detainee cases was heard by the
> U.S. Supreme Court, the national climate had changed. The country was
> politically divided, the presidential election was in full swing, and
> John Kerry was talking about treating terrorism like a criminal
> nuisance. The Guantanamo cases gave lawyers a chance to take a swipe
> at the president's policies, give heroic speeches about protecting the
> rights of indigents, and be a part of the kind of landmark legal cases
> that come along once in a lifetime. The Guantanamo Bay Bar increased
> from a lonely band of activist lawyers operating out of a run down
> office in Greenwich Village to an association of 500 lawyers. Said Mr.
> Ratner about the blue chip firms that initially shunned these cases,
> "You had to beat the lawyers off with a stick."
>
> Mr. Wilner and his colleagues at Shearman & Sterling were the
> exception, although he has been exceedingly coy about the true nature
> of his firm's role. Unlike the many lawyers who later joined in the
> litigation on a pro bono basis, Shearman & Sterling was handsomely
> paid. Mr. Wilner has repeatedly stated that the detainees' families
> insisted on paying Shearman & Sterling for its services and that the
> fees it earned have been donated to an unspecified 9/11-related
> charity. According to one news report, the families had spent $2
> million in legal fees by mid-2004. In truth, Kuwaiti officials
> confirmed that the government was footing the bills.
>
> How did Shearman & Sterling get tapped for this historic assignment?
> Speaking at Seton Hall Law School in fall of 2006, Mr. Wilner
> recounted that he visited the facility at Guantanamo Bay in 2002,
> months before he met the Kuwaiti 12's families. What was Mr. Wilner
> doing at Gitmo more than two years before Rasul established the legal
> basis for lawyers getting access to detainees inside the camp? One of
> his Gitmo legal colleagues has said that Mr. Wilner was brought into
> the case by an oil industry client.
>
> It turns out that Shearman & Sterling, a 1,000-lawyer firm with
> offices in 19 cities all over the world, has substantial business
> dealings on six continents. Indeed, Shearman's client care for Middle
> Eastern matters has established a new industry standard: The firm's
> Abu Dhabi office states that it has pioneered the concept of "Shariah-
> compliant" financing. In Kuwait, the firm has represented the
> government on a wide variety of matters involving billions of dollars
> worth of assets. So the party underwriting the litigation on behalf of
> the Kuwaiti 12 -- from which all of the detainees have benefited -- is
> one of Shearman & Sterling's most lucrative OPEC accounts.
>
> Shearman & Sterling did far more than just write legal briefs and
> shuttle down to Gitmo to conduct interviews about alleged torture for
> the BBC. In addition to its legal services, the firm registered as an
> agent of a foreign principal under the Foreign Agents Registration Act
> of 1938 (FARA) as well as the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (LDA) to
> press the Kuwaiti detainees' cause on Capitol Hill. Shearman reported
> $749,980 in lobbying fees under FARA for one six-month period in 2005
> and another $200,000 under the LDA over a one-year period between 2005
> and 2006. Those are the precise time periods when Congress was engaged
> in intense debates over the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military
> Commissions Act, legislation which Shearman & Sterling and its Kuwaiti
> paymasters hoped would pave the way for shutting down Guantanamo
> permanently and setting their clients free.
>
> Mr. Wilner, a media-savvy lawyer who immediately realized that the
> detainee cases posed a tremendous PR challenge in the wake of
> September 11, hired high-stakes media guru Richard Levick to change
> public perception about the Kuwaiti 12. Mr. Levick, a former attorney
> whose Washington, D.C.-based "crisis PR" firm has carved out a niche
> in litigation-related issues, has represented clients as varied as
> Rosie O'Donnell, Napster, and the Roman Catholic Church. Mr. Levick's
> firm is also registered under FARA as an agent of a foreign principal
> for the "Kuwaiti Detainees Committee," reporting $774,000 in fees in a
> one year period. After the U.S. Supreme Court heard the first
> consolidated case, the PR campaign went into high gear, Mr. Levick
> wrote, to "turn the Guantanamo tide."
>
> In numerous published articles and interviews, Mr. Levick has laid out
> the essence of the entire Kuwaiti PR campaign. The strategy sought to
> accomplish two things: put a sympathetic "human face" on the detainees
> and convince the public that it had a stake in their plight. In other
> words, the militant Islamists who traveled to Afghanistan to become a
> part of al Qaeda's jihad on America had to be reinvented as innocent
> charity workers swept up in the war after 9/11. The committed Islamist
> who admitted firing an AK-47 in a Taliban training camp became a
> "teacher on vacation" who went to Afghanistan in 2001 "to help
> refugees." The member of an Islamist street gang who opened three al-
> Wafa offices with Suliman Abu Ghaith (Osama Bin Laden's chief
> spokesman) to raise al Qaeda funds became a charity worker whose eight
> children were left destitute in his absence. All 12 Kuwaitis became
> the innocent victims of "bounty hunters."
>
> A Montreal-based marketing firm was hired to create the families' full-
> service Web site which fed propaganda -- unsourced, unrebutted and
> uninvestigated by the media -- aimed at the media all over the world.
> Creating what Mr. Levick calls a "war of pictures," the site is
> replete with images meant to appeal to Americans: smiling Kuwaiti
> families wearing T-shirts and baseball caps, cute children passing out
> yellow ribbons.
>
> After the Rasul decision, the PR momentum picked up speed and the
> Supreme Court became, in Mr. Levick's words, their "main weapon," a
> "cudgel" that forced more attention in what he calls the traditional
> "liberal" press. Dozens of op-eds by Mr. Wilner and the family group
> leader (described as a U.S.-trained former Kuwaiti Air Force pilot who
> cherishes the memory of drinking Coca Cola) were aimed at the public
> and Congress.
>
> Mr. Levick maintains that a year and a half after they began the
> campaign, their PR outreach produced literally thousands of news
> placements and that, eventually, a majority of the top 100 newspapers
> were editorializing on the detainees' behalf. Convinced that judges
> can be influenced by aggressive PR campaigns, Mr. Levick points to
> rulings in the detainee cases which openly cite news stories that
> resulted from his team's media outreach.
>
> The Kuwaiti 12 case is a primer on the anatomy of a guerilla PR
> offensive, packaged and sold to the public as a fight for the "rule of
> law" and "America's core principles." Begin with flimsy information,
> generate stories that are spun from uncorroborated double or triple
> hearsay uttered by interested parties that are hard to confirm from ...
>
> read more �
Use "OT:" in subjects for this crap on non-political groups.
