Military-Commission Trials Set for the Summer
The Pentagon is poised to rescind last year's order halting military-commission cases, a final legal step as it gears up to try accused terrorists. But there's an awkward hitch: the new trials will be held in the $12 million, high-tech courtroom at Guantánamo Bay, which will refocus the world's attention on the very prison President Obama pledged to close. "As of right now, we don't have the money or the authority" to hold the trials elsewhere, says a senior Pentagon official who asked not to be identified talking about a politically sensitive subject.
Privately, Pentagon officials are nervous about the prospect of the world press assembling again at Gitmo to observe detainees in military trials. This is especially so because the debut trial this summer is scheduled to be for Omar Khadr, the "boy soldier." Khadr is accused of lobbing a hand grenade that killed an American soldier in Afghanistan when he was 15, and he's become a cause célèbre among human-rights groups that protest against prosecuting minors for war crimes. (Pentagon officials are hoping to avert the trial by negotiating a plea bargain or repatriating him to his native Canada.) But pretrial hearings begin in a few weeks, and the Pentagon has plans to fly a planeload of reporters to Gitmo for the proceedings, says commission spokesman Joe DellaVedova. Once they begin, "it's going to be really difficult to explain how anything has changed from what was going on under Bush," says a top military prosecutor who asked not to be named for the same reasons.
On Jan. 20, 2009, the day of Obama's inauguration, Defense Secretary Robert Gates signed an order stopping all new military-commission cases, giving the administration a chance to sort out how it would handle Gitmo's detainee population (then about 240, now 183). At the time, military-commission trials were seen as a less likely alternative because Obama had attacked them during the campaign. Since then, however, Congress has passed a new law--signed by Obama--aimed at making the proceedings fairer. And last week Gates named retired Adm. Bruce MacDonald, who helped craft the new law, as the "convening authority" to oversee the commissions. Critics, like the American Civil Liberties Union, aren't satisfied, saying the trials still allow for hearsay evidence that wouldn't be OK in a civilian court.
Obama has yet to decide if he'll overrule Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. and order the highest-profile Gitmo detainee, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, tried by a military commission. But military prosecutors are working on as many as 30 new cases, and the Pentagon's directive rescinding Gates's halt order is expected to be signed in the next few weeks. "It's full steam ahead," says the military prosecutor.
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Michael Isikoff has been an award-winning investigative correspondent for Newsweek since 2004. He has written extensively on the U.S. government's war on terrorism, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, presidential politics and other national issues. His book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," co-written with David Corn, was an instant New York Times best-seller when it was published in September, 2006. The book was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "fascinating reading" and "the most comprehensive account of the White House's political machinations" in the run up to the war in Iraq. Since January 2009, Isikoff has been an MSNBC contributor, making regular appearances on the Rachel Maddow Show and Hardball w/ Chris Matthews.
Ever since the events of September 11, Isikoff has broken repeated stories about the U.S. government's war on terror and won numerous journalism awards. His blog "DeClassified: Investigative Reporting in Real Time," which appears regularly on Newsweek's Web site and is written with MarkHosenball, has become a must-read for senior U.S. intelligence officials. Isikoff and Hosenball won the 2005 award from the Society of Professional Journalists for best investigative reporting online.
Isikoff's June 2002 Newsweek cover story on U.S. intelligence failures that preceded the 9-11 terror attacks, along with a series of related articles, was honored with the Investigative Reporters and Editors top prize for investigative reporting in magazine journalism. He was honored, along with a team of Newsweek reporters, by the Society of Professional Journalists for coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal. For that coverage, Isikoff obtained exclusive internal White House, Justice Department and State Department memos showing how decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush administration led to abuses in the interrogation of terror suspects. Isikoff was also part of a reporting team that earned Newsweek the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2002, the highest award in magazine journalism, for their coverage of the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks.
Isikoff's exclusive reporting on the Monica Lewinsky scandal gained him national attention in 1998, including profiles in The New York Times and The Washington Post and a guest appearance on "Late Show with David Letterman." His coverage of the events that lead to President Bill Clinton's impeachment earned Newsweek the prestigious National Magazine Award in the Reporting category in 1999. Isikoff's reporting also won the National Headliner Award, the Edgar A. Poe Award presented by the White House Correspondents Association and the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Reporting on the Presidency. In 2001, Isikoff was named on a list of "most influential journalists" in the nation's capital by Washingtonian magazine.
Isikoff is the author of "Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story," a book that chronicled his own reporting of the Lewinsky story and was hailed by a critic for The Washington Post-Los Angeles Times news service as "the absolutely essential narrative of the scandal with revelations that no one would have thought possible." The book, also a New York Times bestseller, was named Best Non-Fiction Book of 1999 by the Book of the Month Club.
Isikoff came to Newsweek from The Washington Post, where he had been a reporter since September 1981. There he covered the Justice Department and the Persian Gulf War, reported on international drug operations in Latin America and worked on the Post's financial news desk. Isikoff graduated from Washington University with a B.A. in 1974 and received a Masters in Journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 1976.
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