Lawfare against intelligence

NY Times:

The nation’s top intelligence officials have told a federal appeals court in recent days that a July ruling requiring the government to disclose virtually all its information on Guantánamo detainees could cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security.”

The Justice Department has filed a request to overturn that decision, issued by a federal appeals court panel on July 20. The decision was an important victory for detainees’ lawyers, who said it could pierce layers of secrecy shielding what the government knows about many of the 340 men held at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The intelligence officials, including the directors of the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the National Security Agency, said in court filings that the vast disclosure would reveal counterterrorism activities and could disrupt intelligence gathering. They also said assembling the information was so time-consuming that the effort had distracted the agencies from terrorism investigations.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, said in a Sept. 6 affidavit that the information the appeals panel had ordered turned over to detainees’ lawyers “would include information about virtually every weapon in the C.I.A.’s arsenal” and was likely to cause people who were providing information to stop cooperating.

“This outcome,” General Hayden wrote, “would severely restrict the U.S. government’s ability to collect intelligence and wage the war on terrorism.”

The fight about the disclosure is becoming one of the central legal confrontations over Guantánamo, displaying the government’s national security concerns and the claims of detainees’ advocates that officials have repeatedly fended off critics by asserting that much of the information about the detainees cannot be publicly revealed.

“This is just a smoke screen to hide the fact that they can’t justify the detentions,” said David H. Remes, a Washington lawyer who represents a Pakistani detainee at Guantánamo.

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No. The smoke screen is by the terrorist rights advocates who are trying to reveal our sources and methods of gathering information so that the enemy can avoid future detection and preemption of its attacks. Decisions like this would put the national security of the country at risk in order to defend some of the wretched pukes who have been detained in their attempts to commit mass murder against the citizens of this country. This is just another example of why judges have no business interfering with the war effort. The lawfare approach exposes our intelligence gathering. These enemy combatants should have zero access to US courts. They should be detained until the end of the conflict.