Boise lawyers on team to represent detainees

BOISE – Two Boise attorneys will be among 11 lawyers working to defend detainees who face military trials at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, officials with the American Civil Liberties Union say.

Boise lawyer David Nevin and his partner, Scott McKay, previously made a successful defense of Sami al-Hussayen, a University of Idaho graduate student charged with aiding terrorists, the Idaho Statesman reported.

Nevin and McKay declined to comment.

The ACLU said last week that the two Boise lawyers are part of an $8.5 million effort to provide top civilian defense attorneys for military detainees held at the compound.

Among the detainees is one of the alleged masterminds of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“These are a couple of Idaho’s finest attorneys,” said Jack Van Valkenburgh, executive director of the ACLU in Idaho. “They did a very good job with Sami al-Hussayen, who was not a terrorist, but charged with promoting terrorism. They stood strong in defense of his First Amendment rights.”

Van Valkenburgh said Nevin and McKay are “true civil libertarians” who are willing to withstand the public hostility that can go with representing unpopular defendants.

“When the charges are egregious, that’s when the accused need the best – when the full weight of the government is crashing down,” he said.

At al-Hussayen’s 2004 trial, Nevin told the jury during closing arguments that the charges were “an assault of Sami’s right to expression. When you slaughter his rights, you slaughter all our rights. We must not permit that to happen. It touches on a core issue of what it means to be an American.”

In a written response after that trial, Nevin explained his reasons for defending al-Hussayen.

“Obviously the war on terror cannot be fought entirely in the open,” he wrote. “Some aspects of intelligence gathering and planning must be kept secret in order to be effective. In fairness, secrecy must extend no further than is absolutely necessary, and mechanisms for meaningful review of government concealment must be in place to assure that it is not abused. As we are frequently reminded, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

Among those to be defended is Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who military officials say has confessed to masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks and several other terrorist acts, including the beheading of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl.