Opinion ID: 1460165
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Counsel Access to Detainees

Text: Both the Status Quo Order and the Government's Proposed Order define legal mail as correspondence between a detainee and his counsel with respect to subjects properly within the scope of counsel's representation. The parties do not disagree about the rules governing mail sent by a detainee to his counsel, but they do disagree about how mail from counsel to the detainee client should be handled and about the scope of counsel's representation under the DTA. Under both proposed Orders, a Privilege Team composed of Department of Defense personnel would open an envelope labeled as legal mail and addressed to a detainee. Under the Status Quo Order, the Privilege Team would search legal mail only for contraband, such as staples, paper clips, or other nonpaper items; under the Government's Proposed Order, however, legal mail would be searched for prohibited content, that is, anything outside the scope of the attorney's representation (of which more below). The Government's Proposed Order also would limit legal mail to: documents and drafts of documents that are intended for filing in this action and correspondence directly related to those documents that  i. are directly related to the litigation of this [DTA] action [and] ii. address only (a) those events leading up to this detainee's capture or (b) the conduct of the CSRT proceeding relating to this detainee[,] thereby implicitly but effectively limiting the scope of counsel's representation to the DTA action. The Government's Proposed Order also would expressly prohibit counsel from communicating any information outside the scope of their representation. The petitioners object to this regime, first pointing out that under the Status Quo Order, counsel have long been prohibited from telling a detainee about: ongoing or completed military intelligence, security, or law enforcement operations, investigations, or arrests . . . or current political events in any country that are not directly related to counsel's representation of that detainee. Because their counsel have never breached this provision, the petitioners claim the Government does not need to screen for content any legal mail their counsel might send them. The Government responds that while the Status Quo Order was in effect, some counsel  though the Government does not suggest counsel for the present petitioners  did use legal mail to inform their clients about prohibited subjects, including military operations in Iraq, terrorist attacks, Hezbollah's attack upon Israel, and the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. The Government asserts such information can incite detainees to violence or cause unrest, such as a riot, hunger strike, or suicide  as, indeed, it has done in the past. At the least, the petitioners contend, counsel may legitimately represent the detainees in efforts to find alternate ways of ending their detention, including diplomatic means, and therefore must be able to correspond with the detainees regarding such alternatives; for example, they might want to correspond concerning which countries are suitable for seeking asylum. Using nonlegal mail is not a good alternative to using legal mail, they say, because it is very slow and heavily redacted. Moreover, the petitioners assert the attorney-client privilege, which is intended to encourage full and frank communication between attorneys and their clients and thereby promote broader public interests in the observance of law and the administration of justice, Swidler & Berlin v. United States, 524 U.S. 399, 403, 118 S.Ct. 2081, 141 L.Ed.2d 379 (1998) (internal quotation marks omitted), applies to the communications between counsel and the detainees. Without expressing any view as to whether the attorney-client privilege applies in this context, we must agree that full and frank communication between a detainee and his counsel will help counsel present the detainee's case to the court, and thereby aid the process of review with which we have been charged by the Congress. Regrettably, however, we cannot disagree with the Government that past breaches of the Status Quo Order by some counsel for detainees justify the Government's proposal to narrow the topics about which all counsel may correspond with a detainee and to hold all counsel accountable by screening the legal mail they send to their detainee clients. Relatedly, we agree with the Government that the scope of representation authorized by the DTA is limited, in the words of the Act, to the pursuit of judicial review to determine the validity of any final decision of a [CSRT]. We read the Government's proposal, however, to limit the content of the correspondence between petitioners and their counsel to those events leading up to this detainee's capture and the conduct of the CSRT proceeding relating to this detainee, so as to include events occurring between the detainee's capture and his CSRT hearing, such as the claim of at least three of the Parhat Petitioners that they were told by military personnel as early as 2003 they would be released. This is necessary to enable counsel to follow such leads as his client can provide regarding exculpatory evidence that might be reasonably available, but which the Recorder nonetheless failed to obtain and examine. In the protective order to be issued, we will include the Government's proposal to allow a Privilege Team, composed of personnel from the Department of Defense, to review legal mail in order to ensure counsel's correspondence does not include content outside the scope of the previous paragraph. The proposed procedure protects the confidentiality of communications between counsel and the detainee by providing that the Privilege Team may not disclose the content of a communication to anyone unless counsel for a detainee seeks court intervention to prevent the Privilege Team from screening or redacting information sent to the detainee, in which event the Privilege Team may disclose the material at issue to a Special Litigation Team [in the Department of Justice and] . . . to the Commander [at Guantánamo] or his representatives, including attorneys for the Government. The Special Litigation Team, none of whose members may litigate the merits of a petition brought by a detainee, represents the Privilege Team in any dispute over screened or redacted information.