Report: Pentagon Blocking Guantanamo Legal Mail
It seems the Pentagon is interfering with the Guantanamo detainees' ability to send and receive legal mail, including mail to their lawyers and Congress.
The rules guiding attorney/client correspondence at Guantánamo are frustratingly vague, lawyers for the detainees say, and the processing delays are maddening. Mail routinely arrives six months after it's been sent, if it arrives at all. "For months I sent him letters and he sent me letters and they were all just impounded," Hunt says. "Now, I think my letters get through but they take their sweet time about it."
The ostensible reason for the backlog is security. "The attorney/client communications go to a secure facility, which happens to be here in Washington," Hunt says. "And they can't leave there until the government clears it and says it's not sensitive and not classified."
The lawyers sit in a room to read the letters and then have to give them back. They can't disclose the contents of the letters.
In order to read Paracha's correspondence, Hunt must go to the secure location--"a grim featureless office, with blinds drawn 24 hours a day"where he's allowed to read Paracha's letters to him before placing them back in a safe. Last month he saw the 98 letters, painstakingly copied in longhand, which Paracha had sent to him to review and distribute. But Hunt was told he couldn't remove them from the safe. He can't disclose what's in the letters"it's a state secret," he quips--but says "the person with the right authority could sit down, take a glance at them and then say, 'OK they can go out.' "
At least one U.S. Senator is upset by the mail interference.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)... wrote to Rumsfeld on June 5, asking if the Department of Defense has a "written or unwritten policy prohibiting all persons detained at Guantánamo Bay from writing to, or communicating in any manner with, Members of Congress?" If so, "please explain what legal authority supports such a policy."
On the bottom of the letter, Leahy scrawled in pen: "Is this really happening!"
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