Detainees’ respond to new U.S. filings
on May 14, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Lawyers for Guantanamo Bay detainees on Monday told the U.S. Circuit Court in Washington, D.C., that the Pentagon had made a new attempt to curtail that Court’s review of military decisions on holding prisoners at the Cuba facility as “enemy combatants.” In a two-page letter (found here), counsel for detainees reacted to last week’s filings notifying the Court that the Pentagon had changed its policy on detention review to permit submission of new evidence, and its policy of lawyer visits to prisoners at Guantanamo. The government’s filings were discussed and can be found here.
The detainees’ lawyers welcomed the government decision to remove, from its proposal to the Court, a three-visit limit on lawyers’ meetings with detainees at Guantanamo. But the detainees’ lawyer criticized other restrictions on lawyer-client dealings that remain in that proposal.
In discussing the Pentagon’s new rule, allowing detainees’ lawyers to submit new evidence to the Pentagon (but not to military status review panels), the detainees’ counsel said this was an “eleventh-hour effort to forestall judicial review” because it would put any decisions about the effect of new evidence in the hands of the Pentagon alone, beyond the courts’ reach.
The Circuit Court will be examining issues of attorney-client access and handling of classified information, along with other questions about court review of detainee cases, at a 40-minute hearing Tuesday morning in Courtroom 20 in downtown Washington. This is the third scheduled hearing of the day. Issues before the three-judge panel in the Guantanamo cases are discussed in this post.
