Former public testimony disappears from Guantánamo transcripts | Miami Herald - 0 views
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For hours on a Friday, a staff sergeant using the fake name “Jinx” testified in open court about her yearlong work here at a prison for suspected terrorists once considered the CIA’s prized war-on-terror captives.
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The few reporters who went to court or watched on video feeds from Guantánamo to Fort Meade, Maryland, as well as a dozen legal observers and the mother and sister of a man killed in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, heard her say all that in open court. But as far as the public court record is concerned, those things were never said.
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In a first for the war court, intelligence agencies scrubbed those and other facts — including questions asked by the judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl — from a 379-page transcript of the Oct. 30 pretrial hearing in the 9/11 death-penalty case. A Miami Herald examination counted more than 130 pages with blacked out public testimony. Of them, 37 pages are completely redacted in the latest challenge to the remote war court’s motto, “Fairness, Transparency, Justice.” Typically the court releases the transcripts “word for word with no redactions,” chief prosecutor Brig. Gen. Mark Martins told reporters Saturday, defending the “rare” exception of “ex-post redactions” as a security necessity.“I have not encountered it actually thus far for a transcript to be redacted. But there is a rule that enables that,” he said. “The government is fully entitled to look and say in the aftermath … ‘It ought to be protected, it could be damaging.’”
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At issue on Oct. 30 was Pohl’s January restraining order forbidding female guards from touching the alleged Sept. 11 plotters as they come and go from court and legal meetings, an accommodation to their Islamic traditions. The restriction recently sparked outrage among top Pentagon brass and some in Congress. The issue is unlikely to be resolved before a closed session in February to hear classified testimony.But now, in light of the retroactive redacting, case lawyers and the Sept. 11 trial judge will spend Monday huddling in closed court — no public, none of the accused conspirators listening — as they discuss how to go forward with the testimony on Pohl’s controversial restraining order.Yale Law School lecturer Eugene Fidell, whose specialty has long been military justice, said the court has a 40-second audio delay to the public and a security officer assigned to block the feed with white noise and warned that the after-the-fact censorship could be “the new normal.”
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“The military has a real allergy to transparency,” said Fidell after declaring himself dumfounded by the effort to “sanitize stuff that has already been uttered in open court.”“Obviously there are things that can and must be kept secret,” he said. “But to try to get the genie back in the bottle for information that has already been uttered in a public proceeding — especially where there’s a time delay to protect classified information — is preposterous.”