Another Guantanamo outrage:

May 3, 2007
UNWILLING TO close Guantanamo, bring its prisoners to US soil, and let them fight their detention in US courts, the Bush administration now wants to shutter the one window the outside world has on the Kafkaesque conditions in the camp. It is proposing to clamp down on the prisoners' only nonmilitary contacts, their lawyers. The US Appeals Court in Washington should reject this shameful proposal out of hand.
Under the Justice Department plan, lawyers could meet just three times with their Guantanamo clients after an initial meeting in which the prisoner decides whether or not to use the lawyer's services. Prisoners who have been through several interrogations at the hands of the military are often so distrustful of Americans, including lawyers, that it takes extended visits just to establish a normal attorney-client relationship.
The new rules would also allow US intelligence officers to read lawyers' letters to their clients, and they would permit US officials to deny a lawyer access to secret evidence used by the military to determine that a client is an enemy combatant -- all flagrant departures from American justice. As it stands now, the lawyers -- all of whom have security clearances -- can see the material but are forbidden to share it with their clients.
The administration's laughable justification for these restrictions is that client-attorney contacts have led to unrest at Guantanamo. A more obvious cause of the unrest is the fact that many of the prisoners have been held there for more than five years -- with no criminal charge placed against them. Many had so little involvement with either the Taliban in Afghanistan or Al Qaeda that the camp's commanders would happily release them if they could find countries to accept them. But former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld made that hard by describing Guantanamo inmates as "the worst of the worst." Unrest might also be caused by the fact the military is now holding about half the prison's 385 prisoners in isolation, which often leads to mental and physical deterioration.
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