Guantanamo Bay Trials Begin, No Press Allowed
This week, the US will begin initial hearings for fourteen individuals that were transferred from secret CIA jails to the Guantanamo Bay military prison camp in Cuba. The trials are set to begin on Friday, March 9th, and amongst the detainees is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind behind the September 11th attacks. Noticeably missing from the trials, however, will be the press. The Bush administration made the decision to bar news media from being present at the hearings, closing off the hearings entirely.
The Associated Press, in a letter to Pentagon officials, criticized the decision to close off the hearings completely violates the Defense Department’s own regulations. And while they understand that some portions of the trial may need to be conducted without the press present, the AP notes that it is “an unconstitutional mistake to close the proceedings in their entirety.”
The purpose of the hearings is to determine whether a prisoner is an “enemy combatant”. If a prisoner is found to be an enemy combatant, the President may then designate him as eligible for a military trial. The first military trials are expected to begin this summer.
The Pentagon states that the hearings will be closed to the media to protect national security interests that could be compromised by statements made by the detainees. However, others don’t quite believe that that is the true reason behind barring the media. According to Scott Horton, chair of the international law committee of the New York City Bar Association, what they are really concerned about is that “these 14 will open their mouths and say what was done to them. They were tortured and mistreated, and that fact is classified secret, which just shows you the perversity in which this whole process is traveling.”
Not only will no press be allowed, but the detainees are also not allowed to have an attorney present, placing the legal burden on the detainee himself to demonstrate that he is not an enemy combatant. Classified evidence that the US military uses against the detainees is not revealed to them, which makes the possibility of them proving themselves innocent nearly non-exsistant.