Legal Commentary

Guantanamo Lawyers Describe Difficult Conditions

By Jeralyn

Best read of the day so far is The Guantanamo Labrynth in the Chicago Tribune, in which lawyers for Guantanamo detainees describe the restrictions placed on them in defending their clients. Some snippets:

[U]nder the guise of national security, the Bush administration unilaterally revoked all semblance of attorney-client privilege and imposed a byzantine thicket of rules and procedural dead ends that would have impressed Franz Kafka.

The typical drill goes like this: After meeting with clients in Guantanamo, lawyers are obliged to immediately turn over all of their notes to the government for inspection. The inspection can take weeks, and when copies of the notes are finally returned to the lawyer, large sections often are blacked out. The unredacted originals are kept at a secret "secure facility" outside Washington where they can be viewed by defense counsel but not removed. Government lawyers' briefs are deposited at the secure facility, and defense attorneys have to travel to Washington to see them (lawyers are not allowed to reveal the precise location of the facility).

[More...]

Let's say Gorman wants to review the written record of accusations against her clients. She must again travel to the secure facility. If she wants to use this material in preparing a defense for her clients, she must do all her work on secure government computers at the facility and use the facility's secure printer. If she uses her own computer at the facility, that computer becomes "tainted" and is subject to confiscation. Defense lawyers are not permitted to file any document with the court without first submitting it to the Court Security Office, which then shares the document with the government's lawyers. At times, the government's obsession with security borders on the absurd: When defense lawyers work on detainee cases in their own offices, they are supposed to draw the shades.

"Yes, I re-read Kafka during all of this," says Gorman. "Guantanamo is more Kafka than Kafka."

About whether those being held are dangerous:

Despite repeated claims by the Bush administration and its supporters in Congress that the vast majority of the detainees were "vicious killers" who had been "captured on the battlefield," it turns out that only about 5 percent of the detainees were captured by U.S. forces. Most of the rest -- 86 percent, according to a detailed study by Seton Hall University School of Law -- were rounded up by the Northern Alliance or Pakistani security forces in exchange for the reward money, or because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But what is most disturbing to Gorman and the other Guantanamo lawyers is that the CIA knew this almost from the beginning. A classified -- but widely leaked -- agency report from August 2002 concluded that the majority of the detainees had "no meaningful connection to Al Qaeda or the Taliban." Or, as Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, commander of Guantanamo's Delta Camp, told The Wall Street Journal, "Sometimes, we just didn't get the right folks."

Why are they still being held?

Aside from the 14 "high value" detainees who were brought to Guantanamo in September 2006, virtually all of the remaining 241 prisoners are being held because, as Hood put it, "nobody wants to be the one to sign the release papers."

Full post as published by TalkLeft on May 10, 2009 (boomark / email).