Report: Pentagon to beam war crimes trials to U.S. soil
The Obama administration’s handpicked choice to run prosecutions at the Guantánamo war crimes court is pledging a new era of transparency from the remote base, complete with near simultaneous transmissions of the proceedings to victims and reporters on
Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins made the disclosure in a profile published Sunday in the Weekly Standard that likened the West Point,
The 51-year-old Army lawyer finishing up two years in
Two death penalty cases are already in the pipeline: That of the alleged architect of the 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen that killed 17 sailors, and that of the five alleged 9/11 plotters accused of the mass murder.
The trials are certain to garner international scrutiny on the crude court complex built on an abandoned airfield. Now, even before he has started his job, the general told the influential conservative journal that the war court where he prosecutes will “feature new measures to ensure transparency, including a venue enabling victims and media to observe proceedings near-real-time in the continental
They won’t be live because the feeds will be broadcast on a “40-second delay to ensure safeguarding of national security information.” At the maximum-security complex inside Camp Justice, that has meant a security officer can, and has, hit a white noise button to muffle testimony if someone suspects secret or sensitive information is about to be divulged.
At issue in part will be the treatment of the six accused al Qaida terrorists before they got to Guantánamo in September 2006 from years of CIA custody at secret overseas sites. Two of the accused were waterboarded and all were subjected to other Bush administration approved “enhanced interrogation techniques” that the Obama White House now bans.
The CIA still forbids the public to hear what they did and where they did it, even when captives have described their treatment at pre-trial proceedings. The process also shields the identities of CIA agents and contractors who carried out interrogations.
The Weekly Standard piece, which was distributed Sunday on a Pentagon electronic bulletin board, described Martins and the new CIA chief, retired Army Gen. David Petraeus, as “good buddies.” The two men worked together in
A Pentagon spokeswoman was unable to confirm the new transmission policy on Sunday, nor specify where the proceedings would be shown in the
The article depicts Martins as a 6-foot-4 West Point valedictorian who is married to a retired Army helicopter pilot he dated at the U.S. Military Academy, then worked on the Harvard Law Review with fellow law student Obama.
The Pentagon’s General Counsel Jeh Johnson told the magazine that Martins was “a recognized superstar” who would focus not on getting the most convictions but on making the war court credible and sustainable.
Before his current assignment at the Rule of Law Field Force in
Separately, Navy Cmdr. Tamsen Reese said in an email from the detention center Sunday that military medical staff would next month vaccinate guards and other troops at the prison camp complex against swine flu and offer the H1N1 inoculations to the 171 captives.
Reese did not estimate the cost of the program. Nor did she say whether civilians working at the detention center, as well as prison camp staff families, would get swine flu vaccines too.
Guantánamo swine flu shots stirred controversy when the Pentagon flew in special doses to the base in southeast
Some captives have refused to get the injections, Reese said, without specifying how many.
“We anticipate having an ample supply for both troopers and detainees,” she said.
