The Washington Post reports this morning:
Lawyers representing detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, say authorities at the military base have begun reading privileged attorney-client communications—in a sharp break with past practice…. Previously, military personnel at Guantanamo opened the mail in the presence of detainees—thus ensuring there was no contraband in the envelopes—and handed it to them without reading the contents. Last month, the official said, Rear Admiral David B. Woods, the new commander at Guantanamo, changed the policy and insisted on checking that the communications were relevant to commission cases.
It is not clear what sparked the change in policy, but it is a matter of record that a number of law firms have been sanctioned for helping terrorists in Guantanamo pass messages. For example, on March 7, 2006, Thomas Wilner of the law firm Shearman & Sterling used a privileged counsel-detainee meeting to pass questions from the BBC to his client, Fawzi al Odah—and received a letter from the Justice Department declaring his conduct “a serious violation … which cannot be tolerated.” That same year, attorneys for the firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison were sanctioned for sharing non-legal information with their clients at Guantanamo—leading to the suspension of their non-supervised access to detainees.
During questioning, military interrogators expose intelligence to detainees. Al Qaeda terrorists are trained to use visits with their lawyers to transmit this information to their comrades on the outside. According to the “Manchester Manual”—a terrorist training document that was found in the apartment of an al Qaeda operative in Manchester, England—the terrorists are instructed to “take advantage of visits to communicate with brothers outside prison and exchange information that may be helpful to their work outside the prison … the importance of mastering the art of hiding messages is self-evident here …. Information benefits the organization’s command by providing information about the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses … movements of the enemy and his members.”
The arrival of lawyers at Guantanamo gave terrorists held there the opportunity for unscreened communications with the outside world—raising the risk that critical intelligence could be inadvertently passed on to the al Qaeda leadership through family letters or other communications delivered by lawyers. It is likely some serious breach occurred to cause Gitmo officials to enact such a drastic change in screening procedures.
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