For four years, records in the prisoners' habeas corpus lawsuits challenging the legality of their detentions have been piling up in a secure federal facility in the Crystal City neighborhood of Arlington, Va. Because much of the information is classified, the 750 or so attorneys representing the prisoners are required to do and store all their work on-site.
The provision is part of a broad order [1] (PDF) issued at the very outset of the habeas cases -- at the last official count in January, 220 cases remained -- that set rules for how sensitive documents and attorney access should be handled. It calls for the government to destroy all classified records given to, prepared by or kept by prisoners' lawyers -- including originals and copies of writings, photographs, videotapes, computer files and voice recordings -- when the cases end.
Case files already fill 40 to 50 locked file cabinets, and restricted computer drives hold still more. Documents include captives' letters, drawings and poems [2], their attorneys' notes from meetings with them, and reports of their interrogations, according to several lawyers who routinely access the files. In some cases they describe the capture, transfer and investigation of prisoners, the identities of their accusers, and the government's reasons for holding them. The lawyers estimate that a quarter to a third of the records have been marked classified.
Although the lawyers are forbidden to reveal classified details, they could include prisoners' personal accounts of abuses [3] and interrogation procedures [4] that have recently been described in secondhand reports. These voices have been missing, the New York Times noted [5] today, because the government refuses to disclose prisoners' statements and their lawyers operate under a gag order.
The destruction provision does not appear to threaten court papers and government records, according to a September 2007 letter [6] (PDF) from Allen Weinstein, then the chief archivist of the United States, to concerned open-government advocates. The government is required to save those records. But letters and notes between detainees and their lawyers containing classified information will be destroyed, he wrote, because letting the government keep them would endanger the prisoners' attorney-client confidentiality, while letting detainees' lawyers keep them would risk disclosure of sensitive information.
The concern that records might be destroyed seemed academic until recently. The Bush administration had for years fought the captives' right to bring
habeas lawsuits, and the end of the cases seemed nowhere in sight. But last July the Supreme Court said the cases could proceed. The litigations, which had
sputtered along since 2004, gained steam. More lawyers began booking hotel rooms near the Crystal City stronghold, and for the first time they're having to
line up to use the 20 or so government computers there.
... more at ...
http://www.propublica.org/article/government-could-destroy-records-in-hundreds-of-guantanamo-cases-507

