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July 29, 2010 |
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| October 08, 2007 |
By: Julie Kay |
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ife has changed for assistant federal public defender Paul Rashkind of Miami since he started representing two detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
For one thing, he assumes that his phones are bugged and has learned to ignore the constant “clicks” during conversations.
He’s also considered somewhat strange in his neighborhood, where neighbors he never met were interviewed by the FBI during an extensive background check he underwent to obtain a security clearance.
But it’s all worth it to Rashkind.
“This is important work,” he said. “When I first started it, I thought they were all terrorists. When you find out more, though, you wonder whether any of them are. You have people turning against each other, people having business disputes. These are a bunch of people who were scooped up and thrown in there.”
Rashkind is one of a handful of assistant federal public defenders around the nation who has volunteered to represent Guantanamo Bay detainees accused of terrorism and providing support to terror organizations. He is one of only two assistant federal public defenders from Florida who volunteered for the assignment. The other is his son, Noah Rashkind, an assistant federal public defender in Gainesville and astronomy student who is representing a Yemeni. Noah Rashkind did not return calls seeking comment.
Paul Rashkind has represented two detainees — Taj Mohammed, an Afghan shepherd who was released by U.S. officials in late 2006, and Bostan Karim, an Afghani Muslim missionary who insists his sect preaches peace and tolerance and not jihad. While Rashkind was able to secure the release of Mohammed, Karim is still being held at Guantanamo.
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay were entitled to challenge their detentions in federal courts, U.S. District Judge Thomas H. Hogan, chief judge in Washington, assigned lawyers from throughout the country to work on the cases. Aside from Rashkind, several assistant federal public defenders from New Jersey, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Oregon were assigned cases. A host of civil lawyers from large firms also volunteered their time.
Nearly 400 people are detained at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay as enemy combatants in the Bush administration’s war on terror. Various lawsuits have been brought on behalf of the detainees protesting their treatment and alleged denial of due process. Some have been held since January 2002.
Representing Mohammed and Karim has been among the most difficult but rewarding work he has done during his 15 years at the public defender’s office, Rashkind said.
He has visited Guantanamo about nine times. Traveling there presents its own challenges. Lawyers must ride in a small plane with no bathroom for four hours as the plane skirts Cuba to get to the naval base.
Rashkind, who has learned some words of Pashto, an Afghan language, still brings an interpreter with him. He’s unsure whether the cost of the interpreter — $5,000 — comes out of Federal Public Defender Kathleen Williams’ budget or the federal court system’s’ budget. But he says Williams has been supportive of his work.
Once he gets to the camp, conditions do not improve.
Some of the base guards are decent but most are “jerks,” Rashkind said. “They’re just childish.”
It has been reported that guards, in an effort to get detainees to distrust their lawyers, have told them the lawyers are all homosexuals and Jews. Also, Rashkind said, they tell detainees their lawyers are really U.S. government interrogators.
Additionally, he said it’s common for guards not to tell detainees that their lawyers have arrived to see them. “I’ll bump into them later in the day, and they’ll say, ‘They didn’t tell me you were here,’ ” he said.
So how does he elicit trust in his clients?
“That’s part of the job,” Rashkind said.
He said the civil attorneys who represent detainees “take great umbrage” at being treated disrespectfully by guards, while Rashkind and other criminal defense lawyers let the insults roll off their backs.
Meeting with his clients is unlike what he has experienced in any other case. Anything brought into the meeting — a piece of paper, a proposed motion, even a computer — must stay there. It is turned over to a military guard.
“If you bring in a disc with a proposed motion, you can’t take your computer back,” Rashkind said. “Some people have had to leave the hard drives.”
To retrieve the items, Rashkind must fly to Washington and visit a classified reading room. He must also file a request for material to be declassified, including his own notes.
Rashkind has purposely taken a low-key approach to his work for the detainees, eschewing media attention. He suspects the government retaliates against those who take a more high-profile attack position or court the media.
For example, Rashkind says he would not undertake the strategy employed by the federal public defender’s office in Portland, Ore. Those lawyers decided in January to turn to the Internet to try to get their client, Adel Hamad, freed from Guantanamo.
An investigator with the Portland public defender’s office posted an eight-minute video about Hamad and his case on YouTube. The video includes footage the office took in Afghanistan and Pakistan of witnesses whom the defense says supports Hamad’s assertions that he never supported terrorism. It also includes a statement from investigator William Teesdale filmed in Guantanamo.
Additionally, three Portland residents also opened a Web site they created on Hamad to boost awareness of his case. Hamad said the charities he worked for never supported jihadi causes.
Hamad, held since 2003, is still in detention.
“I don’t think it would help to talk about these cases,” Rashkind said. “At some level, it’s about personalities.”
Still, intense media interest in Mohammed probably did not hurt his case, Rashkind acknowledged. The story of Mohammed, dubbed “the goat herder” and “the shepherd” — how he was arrested by the U.S. military after he beat up his cousin, a contractor for the U.S. government — appeared in newspapers around the country.
Karim, Rashkind’s other client, was arrested at the border when the minibus he was in was stopped at the Pakistan border. He was found with a satellite cellphone, $2,700, 3,600 Pakistani rupees and 70,000 Afghan rupees. His hands were scarred with what a doctor determined to be burns from explosives.
According to published reports, Karim argued the package with the phone and money did not belong to him and were given to him by a friend who was asked to step out of the bus. He said the scars were caused from a cooking stove when he was a toddler.
Rashkind said his biggest challenge has been obtaining information about his clients. The government has released little information about the detainees and why they are being held. Rashkind spent weeks reading through 10,000 pages obtained by The Associated Press through a Freedom of Information Act request, and was able to recognize references to Mohammed, although he was not named directly. He submitted the information to the second annual review board and Mohammed, without any explanation, was sent home.
“It seems who is getting returned is random,” Rashkind said.
3 local attorneys awarded for work tracking a conspiracy begun in 1964
Three assistant U.S. attorneys from the Southern District of Florida received the Attorney General’s prestigious John Marshall Award for Trial in Litigation recently.
Juan A. Gonzalez Jr., David A. Haimes and Alicia Schick received the award for their work in U.S. v. Jose Miguel Battle Sr. et al. The trial lasted more than six months and involved 500 boxes of evidence and 28 wiretaps. The team tracked a conspiracy that began in 1964 and continued through the defendants’ arrests in 2004.
The jury found the defendants guilty of eight murders and seven arsons, among other crimes. As a result of the prosecution, one of the nation’s longest running criminal syndicates was dismantled, according to a Department of Justice statement.
Gonzalez, Haimes and Schick were among 191 department employees honored at the DOJ’s 55th annual awards ceremony at Constitution Hall in Washington.
U.S. attorney’s office continues making staff changes
Staff changes are continuing at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, where Bob Senior was named criminal division chief last month.
Filling Senior’s place is David Weinstein, the longtime chief of narcotics, who moves up to Senior’s former position as chief of public integrity and national security.
Moving up the ladder to chief of narcotics is Rick Del Toro, formerly deputy chief in narcotics.
The announcements by U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta come on the heels of major changes in the West Palm Beach office, where the former head of the office, Andrew Lourie, moved to the Department of Justice in Washington to work with Criminal Chief and Assistant U.S. Attorney General Alice Fisher.
Senior was appointed the number two under Acosta — second to First Assistant Jeff Sloman — after veteran prosecutor Matthew Menchel left for private practice in August.
Julie Kay can be reached at jkay@alm.com or at (954) 468-2622.
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