Delving into detainee files

By Lyle Denniston
on Jun 15, 2009 at 2:22 pm

Promptly retaking control over the issue of detainees’ lawyers access to information the Obama Administration may be gathering about Guantanamo Bay prisoners, a federal judge on Monday told Justice Department lawyers to start finding out just what the government’s files may contain. 

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said government counsel would have an “immediate and ongoing” duty to explore that information and report any recommendations about detainees’ fate.  The most significant of the orders she issued on the subject can be found here.

The judge acted less than a week after another federal judge had turned aside the Administration’s plea to broadly curb access to the review that a special task force on Guantanamo detainees has been doing since January.  Senior U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan, in a ruling that can be found here, lectured the government on failing to understand how the courts operate in handling the detainees’ challenges to their continued captivity.  The government had wanted permission to go ahead with the task force’s review without what it said could be interference in the court cases that would slow down the process and threaten President Obama’s timetable to resolve detainee issues so that Guantanamo Bay could be closed down next January.

It was up to individual judges, handling cases one at a time, to determine whether task force materials should be shared for use in the court proceedings, Judge Hogan indicated.  Judge Kollar-Kelly, the first to react, did not wait for lawyers’ maneuvers; instead, she issued her two-page order directing government counsel to find out (1) whether the task force had made any recommendations about specific detainees, and (2) whether any decision had been made on any such recommendation, and report back to her.

Such recommendations or decisions, if made, might “render unnecessary or otherwise inefficient the further expenditure of judicial and party resources” in specific habeas cases, the judge wrote.