Bush’s Justice Department is trying to make Gitmo even more illegal:

Last week, the Justice Department quietly filed a motion with the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that would cap the number of visits by civilian defense lawyers to their clients at Guantanamo at three. Ever. Attorney-client mail would no longer be private. These requests are grounded in the brazen claim that civilian attorneys foment unrest at the prison. Perhaps if the detainees were to be completely isolated and ignored, they would realize how happy they are.

WTF? How can we be letting this happen? Via Slate. It gets worse:

And the real problem at Gitmo, adds Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at NYU law school, is that even after you funnel all 60 or so prisoners who are still awaiting their not-yet-begun “trials” through to their quite inevitable findings of guilt, you still have at least 160 more “who will most likely never be charged, never be tried, and may nonetheless never be sent home.” These are the folks whom, no matter how thin the evidence and how cooked the proceedings, the government still can’t make a case against, yet doesn’t want to release. The Bush administration has absolutely no clue what to do with these people, and they aren’t going to figure it out. So, the new legal strategy seems to be: Stop them from embarrassing us. That means no contact with attorneys who might tell your stories of torture and abuse to the outside world. It means no awkward hunger strikes that might garner world sympathy. It means doing everything you can to make even the “black hole” there disappear. What the government really needs is for the folks down at Guantanamo to stop complaining, stop talking, and stop trying to kill themselves.