"Television’s newest legal drama could be the rawest one ever. It comes later this fall, beamed in from the courtroom near the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Only you won’t get to watch it.Right now, there is only one way to witness a so-called military commission for an accused terrorist: Ask the Pentagon to let you travel to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Be warned: Only journalists and representatives of human-rights groups get approved. And those lucky few civilians admitted to the island have to pay several hundred dollars to hang around a baking-hot military base under constant supervision — vastly stricter than any base in Iraq and Afghanistan.Oh, and they also have to sign a long, confusing list of rules that allows the military to censor all your footage at Gitmo. And if officers think a reporter has violated any of those rules, the journo can kiss future coverage goodbye.But that’s starting to change. Somewhat.The new military commissions chief, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins — who once took Danger Room on a tour of Bagram’s detention center — is letting more sunlight peek into the courtrooms of Guantanamo. Tucked into a fawning Weekly Standard profile is the news that the Pentagon will beam a closed-circuit feed from the commissions room back into an undisclosed venue in the continental United States. There’ll be a 40-second delay to protect classified information.The first such commission to be beamed into the States will probably belong to Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, the accused mastermind of the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole. Commission officials filed capital charges against al-Nashiri on Wednesday. No date for the hearing has been set.But the average citizen probably won’t get to see Nashiri’s commission, or any other Gitmo trial. And since there’s no photography permitted in the courtroom — just the indefatigable sketch artist Janet Hamlin — don’t expect any archived video to show up on the Pentagon’s YouTube channel. (The networks will probably get to shoot video of the closed-circuit, though the details are still undetermined.) Military commissions will remain less transparent than U.S. civilian courts..." |
