Taking a job as General Counsel to Code Pink?
An Army lawyer assigned to defend Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at Guantanamo Bay has resigned his commission after being told he was being pulled from the case to attend a graduate program required for promotion.
Maj. Jason Wright, one of a team of lawyers defending Mohammed, resigned Aug. 26 from the Army, National Public Radio and others have reported.
Wright joined the Army in 2005, and for almost three years, he served on Mohammed’s defense team.
The Army had instructed him to leave the team in order to complete the course. He refused, saying it would have been unethical for him to leave the team.
The nine-month program can be deferred, which Wright had done once before. But his latest request for a deferral was denied without explanation.[…]
Wright told NPR that it was hard to gain any client’s trust, but especially that of Mohammed. “All six of these men have been tortured by the U.S. government,” he said.[…]
The hardest thing to deal with as a defense layer, Wright told NPR, is fighting the government’s influence.
“Leave aside our constitutional principles — which we should try to uphold irrespective of who the defendant may be — the Constitution has been completely stepped on throughout this entire process,” he said. “That’s a separate and distinct issue of how the U.S. now has shown just abhorrent leadership when it comes to actually following essential, fundamental human rights and due-process guarantees.”