Last week, I took part in a panel discussion organized by Revolution Truth, along with David Remes, the attorney for a number of Guantánamo prisoners, which was presented by the activist Tangerine Bolen, with her co-host Pamela Sue Taylor.

The show, entitled, “GTMO, The Rule of Law and the NDAA,” lasted a little over an hour, and is available here as an MP3. A description of the show is here, and I’ve also posted it below as a YouTube video, which has just been made available today.

This was a fascinating show, and it was great to spend an hour on a show with Tangerine, who I got to know through her work at Revolution Truth, and her role as a plaintiff in the case brought by herself, Chris Hedges and others against the US government regarding the mandatory military custody provisions for alleged terror suspects that is contained in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This led to a memorable victory in a US courtroom earlier this year, which I wrote about in my article, Why Does the Government So Desperately Want Indefinite Detention for Terror Suspects? Read the rest of this entry »

In the US government’s farcical world of overclassification, four reporters were banned from Guantánamo last year for reporting the name of a witness in the trial by Military Commission of the Canadian citizen and former child prisoner Omar Khadr, even though his name had been widely reported in the media, and was available online.

That was the Defense Department’s doing, but the whole story of WikiLeaks and its exposure of classified US documents — whether it is the Collateral Murder video, the Afghan and Iraqi war logs, the diplomatic cables, or the Detainee Assessment Briefs from Guantánamo — is one of overclassification across every government department, in which material that should not necessarily be secret was, until it was leaked, jealously guarded by a government that behaves as though it was not elected by the people, and is not answerable to them.

The treasure trove of documents released to WikiLeaks also came about because, after the pre-9/11 failures of the intelligence agencies to communicate with one another, the creation of a vast database accessible by, literally, millions of government employees, was designed to facilitate the sharing of useful information. This was in spite of the fact that it should also have been obvious that, with so many people having access to it, it was only a matter of time before someone concerned with transparency and justice — allegedly Pfc. Bradley Manning, imprisoned for leaking the documents since last May — would take advantage of the 21st century whistleblowing opportunities made available by WikiLeaks to let the world know what it was missing. Read the rest of this entry »