Reporters covering trials of accused terrorists at Guantanamo on Monday will have their first-ever face-to-face chance to air their complaints about the U.S government's restrictive rules, which journalists say make it nearly impossible for the public to follow the proceedings.
Long-simmering tensions that began during the Bush administration boiled over in May when Pentagon officials barred four reporters from future coverage for naming a witness whose identity military commission prosecutors wanted kept secret, even though it had been publicly known for several years.
Former Army Sgt. Joshua Claus, who interrogated Canadian Omar Khadr in Afghanistan, had been court-martialed and convicted for detainee abuse. That was a critical fact in the May hearing, where Khadr's attorneys were arguing that he'd been coerced into making incriminating statements when he, then just 15 and badly wounded, was interrogated, first at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and later at Guantanamo.
The Pentagon's public affairs department made the decision to ban the journalists without any kind of a hearing and without even notifying the journalists that their banning was being contemplated.
Challenged on the ban's legality, the Pentagon eventually relented on three of the four reporters, but not before a long list of complaints burst into the open. They included charges that ever-changing rules cut off reporters' access to defense lawyers, prohibited photographs of even the most banal scenes and let official minders monitor reporters' Internet transmissions, phone calls and even trips to the bathroom.
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