US tries to cut lawyers' access to Guantánamo

The Bush administration is urging a federal appeals court to clamp down on Guantánamo Bay prisoners' ability to see their attorneys and obtain government records to help argue their innocence. In recent court filings, the Justice Department argues that defense lawyers' visits to the prisoners "cause unrest on the base," including hunger strikes and protests, and that the lawyers have improperly served as a conduit to the news media. Lawyers representing some of the prisoners angrily condemned the efforts to make it more difficult for them to visit their clients. The lawyers say restrictions already in place make their jobs all but impossible. They said what was really driving the request was the US government's desire to further diminish the already severely limited scrutiny that Guantánamo receives. Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of the UK-based group Reprieve which represents several dozen prisoners, said of the claims: "They say the lawyers have caused unrest, they say we have caused hunger strikes. This is monumental crap. They say we are inciting them. Of course, we have talked to them about their hunger strikes– that is our jobs. But the hunger strikes are done in reaction to their treatment. And any information we gather has to go through the censors." He added: "This is being done to stop information coming out of Guantánamo. It's being done to stop any journalists finding out what they did to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others." Under the proposals, filed earlier this month in Washington, DC, lawyers would be restricted to just three visits with an existing client, correspondence they send to their clients would be vetted by military intelligence officers, and government officials would be empowered to prevent lawyers from having access to secret evidence used by military tribunals to decide whether the prisoners were "enemy combatants." Ever since the prison opened in January 2002–established to hold alleged suspects rounded up in the so-called "war on terror"– Guantánamo Bay has been the focus of controversy and countless claims of abuse and torture. Three British prisoners who were eventually released without charge said they were abused and mistreated. The Bush administration has sought to restrict the amount of information available about the prisoners and their treatment. When alleged Sept. 11 plotters Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other "high value targets" went before tribunals to assess their status in March, all lawyers and journalists were banned from the proceedings on the grounds of national security. The new Justice Department court papers state: "Just as the detainees have no constitutional right to counsel, there is no right on the part of counsel to access to detained aliens on a secure military base in a foreign country." But lawyers said the government was trying to refuse the prisoners a basic legal right. Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said, "These rules are an effort to restore Guantánamo to its prior status as a legal black hole." Campaigners have long been fighting for the prisoners to be brought to trial or else released. They appeared to have won a victory last summer when the Supreme Court ruled that they had the right to challenge their detention. However, the Bush administration passed new legislation to circumvent the ruling. The government has also rejected attorneys' demands for records, saying the government will determine which records are relevant. "We've brought suit to prove our client is innocent. And the government says it gets to decide what is relevant to those facts," attorney Susan Baker Manning said. "It is absolutely, utterly at odds with everything in our legal system." The filing would also permit a team of intelligence officers and military lawyers not involved in a prisoner's case to read mail sent to him by his lawyer. Many of the approximately 385 foreign nationals at the US Navy prison have been imprisoned for years. Defense attorneys, who were first able to interview their clients at Guantánamo in 2004, began compiling evidence that some detainees were kidnapped by local bounty hunters or were seized by US troops by mistake. Such accounts were a source of embarrassment for the administration. Many of the lawyers say the proposed restrictions would make it impossible to represent their clients, or even to persuade wary detainees–in a single visit–that they were really lawyers, rather than interrogators. The American Bar Association (ABA) also expressed concern over the plans. ABA President Karen J. Mathis said lawyer-client contact is "a deeply embedded principle of American democracy." The New York City Bar said the Bush administration is trying to evade responsibility for problems at the prison by falsely blaming defense lawyers for the trouble. The Justice Department said the mail system was "misused" to inform detainees about military operations in Iraq, activities of terrorist leaders, efforts in the "war on terror," and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. "This is an astonishing and disingenuous assertion," the association president, Barry M. Kamins, wrote in a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Kamins said many detainees have been held in solitary confinement for prolonged periods and have lost hope of a fair hearing to demonstrate their innocence. "Blaming counsel for the hunger strikes and other unrest is a continuation of a disreputable and unwarranted smear campaign against counsel," he wrote. The 137-year-old New York City Bar, with more than 23,000 members, is one of the oldest and largest lawyers' organizations in the country. Attorney Zachary Katznelson sees the Justice Department proposal as an attempt to seal the facility from critics. "If we cannot come in, the only news getting out of here will be the government's carefully crafted version, which to my chagrin as an American deviates far too often from the truth," Katznelson said.