At the Guantanamo show trials, defense attorneys are being asked to respond to motions that they are not allowed to read:

Despite enormous logistical and legal hurdles, defense attorneys for high value detainees at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military prison, say they press on for the judgment of history, if not for a fair turn before the embattled military commissions that substitute for trials in federal court.

Attorneys for alleged 9/11 attack planners Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) and Ramzi Bin al-Shibh and alleged USS Cole bombing plotter Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri described their challenges to an audience gathered by the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School in Manhattan on Wednesday night.

Even though all the defense attorneys are vetted and cleared to access Top Secret documents, they agree that secrecy remains the root of most delays and dysfunction.

“If you sat down to design a system and said, ‘I want to create a legal system where everything will move slowly, glacially,’ you would design this,” said Richard Kammen, who represents al-Nashiri. For example, if Kammen, who is based in Indianapolis, wants to read a classified court document, he must travel to a secure facility in Washington, D.C. to do so. Once, Kammen said, he was ordered to respond to motions he was not allowed to read.

Even when the attorneys are at Guantanamo to meet in person with their clients, a detainee’s own words are considered secret.

“We were told that anything that came out of client’s mouths were considered to be ‘presumptively classified,’” said Jason Wright, who represented KSM until this August. “This phrase ‘presumptive classification’ is something that has never existed before in the laws of the United States.”

To make sure he understood, Wright, a former Army JAG, received a power point presentation at Guantanamo.

“I had a briefer who told me, when you meet with your high value detainee, you have to treat everything that he says as presumptively classified – every word, every utterance, every gesture,” Wright recalled.

“I said, ‘Hypothetically, what if he told me he liked peanut butter sandwiches? Is that classified?’”

“Yes,” he was told.

(emphasis mine)

This is a blot on American jurisprudence and the rule of law.

It is lawless, uncivilized, and cowardly.

^*George Orwell’s real name.