Bushco Seizes Gitmo Detainees' Attorney/Client Documents

One would think that attorney/client communications would be considered privileged and they are, if you're not a detainee being held at the Gitmo gulag. The Washington Post reports that thousands of documents containing lawyer/client communications have now been seized by the US government and are being reviewed.

The reason for this absurd seizure, given by government lawyers, is that the Gitmo detainees who committed suicide had used such documents to plot their 'assymetrical warfare'.

Detainees could apparently hide documents in their cells -- including instructions on how to tie knots and a classified U.S. military memo regarding cell locations of detainees and camp operational matters at Guantanamo -- by keeping the materials in envelopes labeled as lawyer-client communications. Notes that investigators found after the suicides on June 10 were apparently written on the back of notepaper stamped "Attorney Client Privilege," which allowed detainees to communicate secretly without interference, according to government officials.

They had paper and they used it to write their suicide notes and that is being used as a justification to invade their privacy?

The alleged discoveries have led military commanders to suspend allowing detainees to have paper provided by defense lawyers. Government lawyers have also asked a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to allow them to assemble "filter teams" to scour more than 1,100 pounds of documents seized by investigators, some of which are protected by lawyer-client privilege and would usually be off-limits to authorities.

Defense lawyers for Guantanamo detainees said that their clients are closely monitored and should have no way to pass such notes, and that the filing yesterday is designed to complicate their efforts.
[...]
Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents most of the Guantanamo detainees, said the allegations that lawyers could have played a role in the suicides are "patently offensive" and "outrageous." She said the government is again trying to make it difficult for lawyers to represent the 450 detainees held there.

"I can't imagine what they think they've found," Olshansky said last night. "All I can see this as is an elaborate ruse to take away whatever these people have so they have absolutely nothing, and to make these lawyers fight for yet another thing."

there's more...

What we have here is yet another attempt by the heavy-handed Bush administration to make it inpossible for these prisoners to ever find justice.

This comment sums up this whole, sordid affair:

David Engelhardt, who represented Ali Abdullah Ahmed, a Yemeni detainee who killed himself June 10, said there is no way to know if there was a suicide plot because he was never granted access to his client.

"A plot to do what?" Engelhardt said. "Who exactly did he hurt by hanging himself? What do you have to gain besides the stretching of your own neck? This is offensive and ignorant."