Tuesday, November 24, 2009
H. Candace Gorman
The government giveth, and the government taketh away. That’s what attorney H. Candace Gorman found out while representing Guantánamo detainee Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, a Libyan baker married to an Afghan woman who was captured in Afghanistan shortly after the U.S. invasion in 2001 and held for the next eight years at the naval facility in Cuba.
On November 17, the Justice Department told Gorman that her client was finally being released, prompting her to announce the good news through her blog (The Guantánamo Blog). Then, just days later, government officials ordered Gorman to take down her post, claiming the information contained in it was “protected” and not for public consumption. Gorman argued otherwise, but complied nonetheless. Although the post is no longer on her blog, it still can viewed thanks to Google cache.
Gorman later wrote on her blog: “This is of course outrageous conduct by the DOJ … in trying to declare something as ‘protected’ after being clearly designated and distributed to the public, but what else is new?”
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Justice Department Pointlessly Gags Guantanamo Attorney (by Andy Worthington, Public Record)
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