One can't be left with an impression other than Obama being really no different to George Shrub. But, Obama is supposed to be a lawyer, and law teacher, to boot.
It is therefore more than troubling to read this report from Huffington Post how the Pentagon seeks to have at least some reporters barred from trials relating to Gitmo:
"Jack Newfield, the legendary investigative reporter, once wrote that if government officials had their way, journalists would be "stenographers with amnesia."
The "amnesia" part, at least, was generally considered a bit of an exaggeration.
But now, the Pentagon has banned four reporters from covering the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, because they refused to forget something that had already been reported to the world.
The four reporters were covering military commission hearings at which defense attorneys for Canadian detainee Omar Khadr argued that confessions he made as a gravely wounded 15-year-old shouldn't be admissible in his upcoming trial because they were made under duress.
And indeed, witnesses earlier this week described how Khadr's interrogation began when he was still sedated and lying wounded on a stretcher. A medic testified that he once found Khadr chained by his arms to the door of his cage-like cell, hooded and in tears
But the defense's star witness, on Thursday, was the first U.S. Army interrogator to question Khadr. The interrogator admitted that in an attempt to get Khadr to talk, he told the boy a "fictitious" tale of an Afghan youth who was gang-raped in an American prison and died.
And it wasn't just what he said that was significant, it was also who he was. The interrogator was Army Sgt. Joshua Claus, who pleaded guilty in September 2005 to mistreatment and assault of detainees at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan.
Claus was a central figures in the interrogation of an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar whose death in U.S. custody in 2002 was ruled a homicide by military investigators and was the subject of a New York Times investigation and the Oscar-winning documentary, "Taxi to the Dark Side"."
Continue reading here.
It is therefore more than troubling to read this report from Huffington Post how the Pentagon seeks to have at least some reporters barred from trials relating to Gitmo:
"Jack Newfield, the legendary investigative reporter, once wrote that if government officials had their way, journalists would be "stenographers with amnesia."
The "amnesia" part, at least, was generally considered a bit of an exaggeration.
But now, the Pentagon has banned four reporters from covering the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, because they refused to forget something that had already been reported to the world.
The four reporters were covering military commission hearings at which defense attorneys for Canadian detainee Omar Khadr argued that confessions he made as a gravely wounded 15-year-old shouldn't be admissible in his upcoming trial because they were made under duress.
And indeed, witnesses earlier this week described how Khadr's interrogation began when he was still sedated and lying wounded on a stretcher. A medic testified that he once found Khadr chained by his arms to the door of his cage-like cell, hooded and in tears
But the defense's star witness, on Thursday, was the first U.S. Army interrogator to question Khadr. The interrogator admitted that in an attempt to get Khadr to talk, he told the boy a "fictitious" tale of an Afghan youth who was gang-raped in an American prison and died.
And it wasn't just what he said that was significant, it was also who he was. The interrogator was Army Sgt. Joshua Claus, who pleaded guilty in September 2005 to mistreatment and assault of detainees at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan.
Claus was a central figures in the interrogation of an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar whose death in U.S. custody in 2002 was ruled a homicide by military investigators and was the subject of a New York Times investigation and the Oscar-winning documentary, "Taxi to the Dark Side"."
Continue reading here.
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