HELD
AT BAY
cess to classified information that
might be relevant to building their
defense cases. Journalists have increased standing before the court.
“Anyone who was familiar with
the process before and looks at it
now, I think, is looking fairly at
it, would say there’s a significant
proportion more of this proceeding
that we can look at, understand,
analyze,” Martins said.
Demonstrating that transparency has proven difficult at times,
however. Last month, in the first
day of hearings in the 9/11 case,
an anonymous censor cut off the
closed-circuit TV feed of the proceedings that members of the
media were watching. Normally,
the judge and the court security
officer could censor information
they feel should remain classified.
But neither had moved to censor
the information in this instance,
leaving journalists and defense
lawyers to infer that the CIA was
secretly pulling the strings behind
the scenes and undermining the
commission’s established rules.
The judge ordered the outside
censor button removed, but the
controversy ate up most of the
week’s proceedings, even bleeding
into a separate hearing involving a
defendant charged in connection
HUFFINGTON
03.03.13
with the attack on the USS Cole in
October 2000, as defense attorneys
questioned whether they could
ethically continue if they believed
their communications were being
monitored. Two weeks later, when
the hearings reconvened, lawyers
were still debating issues involving
the monitoring of communications
THE BASE FEATURES A STARBUCKS,
A SUBWAY, A MCDONALD’S, A KFC/TACO
BELL, A SUPERMARKET, A GOLF COURSE,
A RESTAURANT SERVING JAMAICAN
JERK CHICKEN AND AN IRISH PUB.
that the incident raised.
Similarly, Martins has sought to
dismiss charges against a number of
detainees that he feels are not sustainable under international law,
only to be overruled by the more
senior Pentagon officials who oversee the military commissions.
Martins told HuffPost that, to
him, the dispute over the charges is
about “principled disagreements”
between government officials carrying out their duties “honorably
and faithfully under the law.” Critics, however, say it shows that the
reforms to the commissions system
are just cosmetic changes to a fundamentally flawed tribunal process.
“Some people call him the ‘re-