Military Lawyers Caught in Middle on Tribunals

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On Wednesday evening, the night before a crucial Senate vote on the Bush administration plan for the interrogations and trials of terrorism suspects, the Pentagon general counsel, William J. Haynes II, summoned the senior uniformed lawyers from each military service to a meeting.

The lawyers, known as judge advocates general, had been pivotal players in years of debate over detention, interrogation and prosecution.

They had repeatedly sparred behind the scenes with Mr. Haynes, the top civilian lawyer in the Defense Department. This summer, the judge advocates general emerged in public after the Supreme Court struck down a Bush administration plan to take an important role in opposing parts of a White House effort to resurrect military commissions for terrorism suspects in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

But at the meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Haynes sought to enlist the lawyers on the administration’s side by asking whether any would object to signing a letter lending their support to aspects of the White House proposal over which they had voiced little concern.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/16/washington/16jags.html?hp&ex=1158379200&en=a866528fffc9b846&ei=5094&partner=homepage