That Anonymous Coward alerts us to the news that DC federal appeals court has issued a ruling (pdf) in the case of Gitmo detainee Adnan Farhan Abd Al Latif, but the entire ruling is classified, so the public has no idea what it says. A ruling last year at the district court had ordered the administration to release Latif for lack of evidence that he had anything to do with Al Qaeda. And now... we have no idea what the government is ordered to do or not do. So what do we do in a time when the federal government gets to come up with secret interpretations of law and then can have court rulings on related issues entirely hidden from the public?

In the business world, if you sign a non-disclosure agreement, it's well accepted that if the information covered in that agreement later becomes public through other means, you are no longer bound by the agreement. This makes sense. After all, why should anyone be forced to clam up about information that's already public. And, yet, for no good reason at all, it seems our government prefers a system where everyone is supposed to keep their head in the sand about public info. Witness the mind-numbingly bizarre claim that lawyers for Guantanamo detainees are not allowed to look at the documents that a bunch of newspapers released earlier this week (the documents allegedly came from Wikileaks, but apparently Wikileaks itself did not release them to the newspapers). Yes, these documents are all over the news and are widely available from multiple sources... yet the government has warned the lawyers not to look:

On Monday, hours after WikiLeaks, The New York Times and other news organizations began publishing the documents online, the Justice Department informed Guantanamo defense lawyers that the documents remained legally classified even after they were made public.

Because the lawyers have security clearances, they are obligated to treat the readily available files "in accordance with all relevant security precautions and safeguards" -- handling them, for example, only in secure government facilities, said the notice from the department's Court Security Office.

The NY Times, rightly, calls this "absurdist." I'd call it out right stupid. It's head-in-the-sandism. If the information is public, live with it. It's public. Pretending that public information is not public doesn't help anyone. It just makes it look like the government is in denial and not dealing with reality. Frankly, I'd much prefer a government that can deal with reality to one that tells everyone to cover their eyes and ears and pretend reality doesn't exist.

Of course, this is not the first time we've seen this. With just Wikileaks, we saw it a few months ago when parts of the federal government barred employees from looking at the site and its leaks, using the identical rationale. So, despite the fact that everyone else in the world could easily see those documents, the ones who it might impact the most have to pretend that the documents are not actually public.

It's government playing make believe.

It's also not unlike the ridiculous hoops the government made lawyers go through in the al-Haramain case, in which the government accidentally leaked a document proving that it had wiretapped without a warrant. And despite the fact that the document had been leaked, it was required that lawyers for al-Haramain pretend the documents were still secret, leading to an absolutely insane process by which the lawyers had to destroy all of the copies they had of this info, and could only refer to it obliquely from memory, with a Justice Department official watching over them, with the ability to force them to stop talking about certain aspects.

None of this makes any sense. Just like we have "security theater," this appears to be "classification theater." These documents are not classified any more. Period. Pretending they are is a charade that the government is putting on which everyone knows is a lie. Isn't it time we had our government stop pretending and start dealing with reality?