Department of Injustice—Gitmo Edition

By Scott Horton

The world erupts in outrage over the mistreatment of prisoners in Guantánamo. America’s closest allies around the world and the world’s spiritual leaders demand that Guantánamo be closed. Bush’s own Secretaries of Defense and State push to close it down. But what’s the reaction of Alberto Gonzales’s Department of Justice? Make conditions at Guantánamo still more repressive. Reduce legal proceedings there to farcical levels of procedural unfairness. Brutalize the prisoners through forced-feeding techniques that constitute torture as a matter of settled law. And now: cut off visits by lawyers who constitute the eyes and ears of the outside world.

Saying that visits by civilian lawyers and attorney-client mail have caused “intractable problems and threats to security at Guantánamo,” a Justice Department filing proposes new limits on the lawyers’ contact with their clients and access to evidence in their cases that would replace more expansive rules that have governed them since they began visiting Guantánamo detainees in large numbers in 2004.

The name “Department of Justice” since the arrival of Alberto Gonzales, Paul J. McNulty and William Moschella can only be understood today as an Orwellian term. What they do has nothing to do with justice. Guantánamo will forever be associated with criminal misdeeds. However, the perpetrators will be recognized by all posterity as those whose betrayal of America’s most fundamental values has made a mockery of the claim to do “justice.”