NYT PAGE ONE, LEAD: Justice Department asks court to restrict Guantanamo lawyers

Court Asked to Limit Lawyers at Guantánamo
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
Published: April 26, 2007


(Paul J. Richards/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images)
A military guard on duty this week at the United States naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where about 385 detainees remain in custody.

The Justice Department has asked a federal appeals court to impose tighter restrictions on the hundreds of lawyers who represent detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the request has become a central issue in a new legal battle over the administration’s detention policies.

Saying that visits by civilian lawyers and attorney-client mail have caused “intractable problems and threats to security at Guantánamo,” a Justice Department filing proposes new limits on the lawyers’ contact with their clients and access to evidence in their cases that would replace more expansive rules that have governed them since they began visiting Guantánamo detainees in large numbers in 2004.

The filing says the lawyers have caused unrest among the detainees and have improperly served as a conduit to the news media, assertions that have drawn angry responses from some of the lawyers.

The dispute is the latest and perhaps the most significant clash over the role of lawyers for the detainees. “There is no right on the part of counsel to access to detained aliens on a secure military base in a foreign country,” the Justice Department filing argued.

Under the proposal, filed this month in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the government would limit lawyers to three visits with an existing client at Guantánamo; there is now no limit. It would permit only a single visit with a detainee to have him authorize a lawyer to handle his case. And it would permit a team of intelligence officers and military lawyers not involved in a detainee’s case to read mail sent to him by his lawyer.

The proposal would also reverse existing rules to permit government officials, on their own, to deny the lawyers access to secret evidence used by military panels to determine that their clients were enemy combatants....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/washington/26gitmo.html?ref=todayspaper

What a shameful development.

1000 years will not erase the deeds

is a one-eyed Jack rather than an ace. And the one-eye is because the Cheney admin poked the other one out.

Wasn't he the one bitching about "Stalinist" procedures being conducted by Henry Waxman just the other day?

came along.

The American Gulag: Justice BushAmerican Style

They are obviously afraid that they can't win on the merits of their cases. So they try to lay on restrictive rules on the defense attorneys.

Typical.

This place should be closed down already. Why don't they just eliminate the farce of lawyers altogether? That would simplify things. Just announce that they are all guilty and that we must just accept that and then sentence them all to death? Why not? They already have stripped these people of all human rights. At this point it's just a laboratory to research different ways of torturing people- Dr. Mengele would be seeting with envy.

I weep for my country that this is being done in our name. Whatever happened to equal protection and innocent until proven guilty? It's in another country for Chrissakes. Since when do we remove the judicial system from our land? It's obvious that they are there just to avoid laws.

385 human beings locked up like dogs in a shelter. At least dogs have a chance of getting out. I don't know who they are and what they are suspected of doing so I couldn't logically have any rational for feeling they deserve it. For all we know they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.