An effort to restore Guantánamo to its prior status as a legal black hole

our government at work, doggedly pursuing a strategy to remove the most fundamental principles upon which the republic was founded...

from the nyt via raw story...

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.

[...]

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 Guantánamo, which he described as a “legal black hole” before the courts permitted access for the lawyers in 2004.

“These rules,” Mr. Hafetz said, “are an effort to restore Guantánamo to its prior status as a legal black hole.”

gosh, was it only today that i posted on the article outlining the 10 steps for destroying a democracy and installing a fascist state...? my how time flies...

steps 2 and 10...

2. Create a gulag [Guantánamo, CIA black sites, military tribunals, Military Commissions Act, suspension of habeas]

10. Suspend the rule of law [John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007, violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, possibility of the declaration of federal martial law]

it's hard for me to comprehend that the department of justice is still, even after the attorney general being revealed as nothing more or less than a bush/cheney sock puppet, running totally out of control...

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