Obama Administration Wants to Hide Gitmo Force-Feed Trial From Public

The Obama administration’s Justice Department is
trying to keep a trial about force-feeding at Guantanamo Bay out of
the public eye.

The Miami Herald‘s indefatigable Gitmo reporter Carol
Rosenberg writes:

Justice Department lawyers filed the motion at
the U.S. District Court in Washington on Friday. Lawyers for the
detainee and news media organizations are opposing it. …

The Justice Department proposes to adopt a Guantánamo war court
model of closing the hearing. It argues that not all the testimony
will involve state secrets but, because some of what witnesses say
touches on classified information, the judge should close it. As a
remedy, it proposes, order that the court issue a transcript of the
hearing — with any classified information blacked out.

One of the proposed witnesses is Sondra
Crosby, a doctor who treats victims of torture,
who testified
in open court at Guantánamo in April that another captive
facing death-penalty proceedings was subjected to mental, physical
and sexual torture.

This case centers on Abu Wael Dhiab, 43, who has been in the
prison since 2002. He’s
never been charged with a crime and has been cleared for
release since 2009.

He participated in widespread hunger strikes last year.
Consequently, he was force-fed. U.S. District Court Judge Gladys
Kessler in May approved his request for a restraining order to
guards from force-feeding him, but the order recently expired. He
wants it renewed, because he’s being force-fed again.

Kessler is set
hear on October 6-7 Dhiab’s claim that “the U.S. military
policy of forcing him from his cell, strapping him into a restraint
chair and pumping a nutritional supplement into his stomach amounts
to torture.”

While the federal government says it needs to censor documents
for national security purposes, Dhiab’s lawyers
tell Politico, “There is no reason to close the
upcoming hearing, other than the government’s intense desire to
hide from public scrutiny the evidence we have managed to uncover
over the past few months.”

Rosenberg writes that 16 media organizations are filing motions
to keep the case transparent.

The Associated Press has previously
pointed out the significance of public knowledge about prison:
The number of hunger strikers is an “unofficial barometer of
conditions at the secretive military outpost.” Late last year, the
prison abruptly stopped publishing updates on those numbers,
though.

President Barack Obama has previously
made statements in opposition to force-feeding hunger strikers,
but has taken no action to end the practice. 

Here are some Reason TV facts about Gitmo in 54 seconds: