Forecast: Chance of sunshine at Guantanamo Bay

The Department of Defense (DoD) last week launched a website to make it easier for journalists and the public to follow the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay.

The website features historical information about the commissions, a library of relevant U.S. Supreme Court decisions, news updates and court documents. Notably, the documents include party filings in cases against suspected terrorists.

The DoD already has used the site to announce the war-crimes prosecution of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, a Saudi man accused of planning the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. That attack killed 17 sailors and wounded 37 others.

The website is a welcome window into a place that’s been as secretive as the backwoods shed where my friends in high school used to drink. Journalists for years have complained about the difficulty of covering Guantanamo. As Daniel Skallman reported in 2010 for The News Media & The Law:

[M]ilitary personnel in charge of the press at the camp have not only been applying the most extreme interpretations of reporter ground rules, but they have also been inconsistent when enforcing them and sometimes ignore the rules altogether.

One of the most common grievances brought by reporters has been the inconsistent censorship of what military personnel considered “restricted” information, which is often done without any explanation and doesn’t follow any guidelines . . . . Two commonly cited complaints are the redaction of publicly known information from court briefs and the destruction of photos containing “sensitive” or “classified” material.

A third complaint is that Guantanamo prosecutors often discuss documents in court that are unavailable to the press. Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg, who’s covered Guantanamo for eight years, wrote last week that the website might suffer from the same problem.

“The Nashiri [Web] page . . . included only prosecution documents against Nashiri,” she wrote. “Conspicuously missing was a July 15 filing by Nashiri’s Pentagon defenders claiming that the case was too tainted by delay and CIA torture to go forward.”

DoD spokesman Dave Oten said the July 15 document would not be added to the website because it was an internal correspondence, not intended for disclosure, between the defense and prosecution.

That doesn’t bode well, but on balance the website is a step in the right direction. It’s one of several steps, in fact, the DoD is taking to open up Guantanamo. The other major one is a plan, disclosed last week by Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, the incoming chief prosecutor, to televise the military commissions. The video will be “near real-time” and available at a venue “in the continental United States.” The details are forthcoming.

But that’s right, Guantanamo let in cameras before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Jonathan Peters is a lawyer and the Frank Martin Fellow at the Missouri School of Journalism, where he is working on his Ph.D. He has written on legal issues for a variety of news media, most recently Wired and PBS. He can be reached at jonathan.w.peters@gmail.com