Back in May, the Pentagon banned from Gitmo four journalists for "revealing" the name of a witness whose name was all over the open Internet. Now, three of the reporters are back. The fourth tells Danger Room he can't return to Guantanamo Bay to report on the trials there just yet.
In a nutshell: to return to Guantanamo, the banned scribes needed to assure a senior Pentagon public affairs official named Bryan Whitman that they will respect a set of ground rules intended to prevent the release of sensitive information about detainees and the detention facility. The witness was testifying under cover of anonymity, even though his name had been previously revealed --ironically, in an on-record interview years ago with one of the banned journalists.
From Paul Koring's perspective, that assurance is too close to an admission of guilt. "I have not met Whitman's requirement for a personal letter that admits I broke the ground rules," e-mails Koring, a D.C.-based journalist for the Globe & Mail -- a sticking point for him, since, he adds, "I don't believe I did."
As we reported on Friday, a number of news organizations are pressing the Pentagon to clarify those ground rules to meet cases like the one that got the four journos banned. Among the questions they'd like the Pentagon to answer: How are journalists supposed to deal information that's already in the public domain, accessible to anyone with Google and Wikipedia, but that the Defense Department unilaterally decides is off limits?
In any case, Koring says he intends to write a letter to Whitman requesting reinstatement. "Whether it satisfies the conditions he has imposed for lifting the ban -- which amounts to a refusal to transport journalists to Guantanamo unless they agree to his conditions -- will be up to him."
One of Koring's fellow blocked journalists, Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald, returned to Guantanamo on Sunday to cover the resumption of a pre-trial hearing for detainee Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen charged with killing a U.S. Special Forces sergeant in Afghanistan in 2002. (Rosenberg is already tweeting the non-classified parts of the proceedings.) Her fellow reinstated colleagues, CanWest reporter Steve Edwards and Toronto Star journalist Michelle Shephard, expect to join her next month for Khadr's military commission.
There are different interpretations of what the banned journalists must affirm for reinstatement at the island Naval base. Like her colleagues, Rosenberg doesn't consider herself to have conceded violating the ground rules in the first place, for instance. Pentagon officials insist that they aren't looking for the journalists to admit prior violations -- just to pledge that they're going to abide by the ground rules in the future. Rosenberg did that in a mid-June letter to Whitmanand was reinstated last week.
To quickly recap what got her banned: the four journos were kicked off the island after reporting the name of a witness who testified in Khadr's pre-trial hearing, a former Army soldier Joshua Claus, who testified under anonymity even though he had previously given an interview to Shephard outing himself as one of Khadr's interrogators. (In an unrelated incident, Claus pleaded guilty in 2005 to the abuse of a different detainee at the Bagram Collection Point, Dilawar, and served five months in jail for maltreatment.)
"While I am deeply respectful of the importance of not undermining national security nor the personal security of anyone," Koring continues in his email, it seems that Mr. Whitman is requiring that those banned agree with his interpretation that even previously published information in the public domain -- such as the identity of Joshua Claus and his courts martial in connection with the unlawful death of a Bagram detainee and his role as Omar Khadr's lead interrogator -- be suppressed or omitted from dispatches files from Guantanamo, even when Sgt. Claus has personally sought out the media to identify himself."
The Globe & Mail will send another reporter to cover Khadr's pre-trial hearing this week. Koring is in Kigali for a three-week stint as a teacher -- something he cheerfully describes as a good excuse to get out of D.C. for a bit.
Credit: DoD
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