It is, except for lawyers representing prisoners.
Monday, hours after WikiLeaks, The New York Times and other news organizations began to publish that the online documents, the Department of Justice has informed Guantánamo defence lawyers who remain legally classified documents even after that they were made public.
Because lawyers have security clearances, they are obliged to treat the files easily accessible "in accordance with all relevant and guarantees safety precautions" - handle, for example, in government facilities secure, said the notice, registry of the Ministry of security.
It is only the latest absurd challenge posed by floods of classified documents obtained by WikiLeaks during the past year: reports of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the land cables the State Department; and now the military of the past or present risks of assessments of 700 prisoners at Guantanamo.
Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern law professor representing Abu Zubaydah, the inmate accused of being a terrorist facilitator who was among by the Central Intelligence Agency, said that he could not comment on the newly disclosed his client assessmentwhich is displayed on the website of the time.
"Everyone can talk about it," said Mr. Margulies. "I can't talk about it".
The category of ballooning of documents classified by public-but a confused of officials and led to an unusual series of positions of government agencies and those who work with them.
In December, Columbia University warned international relations students commenting on the documents released by WikiLeaks online or connecting their likely to jeopardize their chances of obtaining a Government position. The same month, the United States of Agency for International Development told workers that the viewing of documents on a computer at work or home (not classified) might violate safety rules that govern their jobs. In February, a unit of the Air Force has warned that employees and their family members could be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for review the WikiLeaks documents at home.
Some of these warnings were quickly amended or withdrawn after attract ridiculous public. But the general principle that leaks files remain classified remains in force, with different consequences.
Some foreigners for asylum in the United States tied the diplomatic cables printed from the Internet that describe the repression in their country of origin - requiring the Department of Homeland Security to store their applications in special chests and cumbersome security rules apply.
Employees of the State Department said that they read a leak of cables on newspaper Web sites at home instead of may disorder are viewable at work. A journalist from the Times who appears with a head of the Department of State on a recent Panel was advised not to show cables leaks as slide - official has been banned from watching.
But the ban to Guantánamo lawyers has serious consequences, said Mr. Margulies, who wrote a book on Guantánamo and has represented five prisoners. Decisions on the subject that gets released were influenced by politics and the pressure of the public as well as by legal standards, he said.
"It is important to be able to use these documents to shape and inform the debate on the public square," he said. If an assessment of the risk of leakage contains clearly false accusations of a prisoner, a lawyer should be able to respond publicly, he said.
On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric h. Holder Jr. has told reporters that he considered that the dissemination of classified documents Guantánamo, prepared under the Bush administration, to be "deplorable". And he said that the Obama administration would not in public, even with deletions, its own evaluations of 240 prisoners who were still in Guantánamo, when he took office in 2009.
The new files, Mr. Holder said, "involve a wide range of information gleaned from a wide range of sources, some are classified".
"However,", he added, "" I would be concerned about the information that was incomplete.""
During this time, Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Department of Justice, said that the Department strives to respond to questions by lawyers for the Guantánamo detainees on restrictions on the use of disclosure of documents.
"We are working through these issues now," said Mr. Boyd. "We want simply to ensure that any information published by WikiLeaks is managed properly."
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