text: Guantánamo Files - Detainees' Lawyers Have Restricted Access to Leaked Documents - NYTimes.com
  Published: April 26, 2011 Sign In to E-Mail
  At the Congressional Research Service, the branch of the Library of Congress that advises senators and representatives, employees were advised in December that they could not quote the classified documents obtained by WikiLeaks in their reports. Some analysts with the service grumbled privately that members of Congress were asking about diplomatic cables, but they were not permitted to quote the cables in reply. The Guantánamo Files
  Janine D'Addario, a spokeswoman for the research service, said she could not say whether the restrictions had hampered its work because its research was supposed to be confidential. But Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said there was no question that the researchers were handicapped as they reported on the wars, foreign relations or Guantánamo. "It's the definition of self-defeating," Mr. Aftergood said. "It doesn't serve the interest of Congress or the public." Mr. Aftergood said the problems had resulted from the unprecedented scale of the WikiLeaks disclosures, which the rules did not anticipate. Tens of thousands of military documents have been disclosed, and about 8,000, so far, of a cache of 250,000 diplomatic cables. "The surge of classified documents into the public domain has tied the system up in knots," he said. The rush to impose patently pointless restrictions "does demonstrate a disappointing lack of agility in the security system," Mr. Aftergood said. But Peter J. Spiro, Peter J. Spiro, a former State Department lawyer and National Security Council staffer who teaches international law at Temple University, said the government's dilemma was real. The law is clear: only a document that is properly declassified loses its protections. And if the government ruled that classified documents disclosed to the public were automatically declassified, that would simply create a more powerful incentive for disgruntled government employees to leak. "The trouble is, it makes the government look totally ham-handed," Mr. Spiro said. "There are documents on the front page that everyone's talking about, and it looks ridiculous to pretend they're not there." « Previous Page 1 2 A version of this article appeared in print on April 27, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Detainees' Lawyers Can't Click on Leaked Files.