The Justice Department has asked a federal appeals court to put tighter restrictions on the hundreds of lawyers who represent detainees at Guantanamo 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 Guantanamo," a Justice 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 Guantanamo 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 denials 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 U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the government would limit lawyers to three visits with a current client at Guantanamo; there is no limit now.
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 and 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.
Many of the lawyers say the 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.
Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, a lawyer who has helped to coordinate strategy for the detainees, said the government was trying to disrupt relationships between the lawyers and their clients and to stop the flow of public information about Guantanamo.
"These rules," Hafetz said, "are an effort to restore Guantanamo to its prior [pre-2004] status as a legal black hole."
