Wikileaks has published a second leaked Standard Operating Procedures manual that provides detailed instructions about how guards at Guantanamo's Camp Delta were instructed to treat detainees at the military prison in 2004. Like the 2003 Gitmo manual that Wikileaks published last month, this document is unclassified but still contains significant information about the isolation of prisoners, the use of dogs at Guantanamo, and forms of punishment for detainees. Wikileaks editor Julian Assange has put together a handy side-by-side comparison showing changes between the 2003 and 2004 documents.
Wikileaks also published a second document this week that details instructions for dealing with rendition flights involving the air transport of detainees. The document includes a diagram (pictured at right) of an airplane used for renditions. The document is fairly large and Wikileaks hasn't had time to analyze it. Therefore the organization is asking readers to help them review it and post interesting findings.
For anyone who is interested, I wrote a story earlier this year for the San Francisco Chronicle about a lawyer who is representing a Gitmo detainee and what it's like for him and hundreds of other pro bono attorneys around the country to defend Gitmo detainees who have been imprisoned for more than five years without being charged with a crime.
The lawyers face significant hurdles to meet with clients and have had to deal with erosions in attorney-client privileges. They can't, for example, leave Guantanamo with any notes they take from meetings with their clients. Instead, the notes are marked classified and sealed in an envelope and sent to a government facility in Washington, DC. The attorneys are barred from discussing anything in the notes unless they go through a formal process to get the notes unclassified. To do this, they have to give the government permission to read the notes to determine what can be declassified.
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