While D.C'.s chattering class is preoccupied with the journalism scandal that isn't, and while Andrew Breitbart continues to deny responsibility for posting a heavily edited video that resulted in Shirley Sherrod losing her job, there is an actual freedom of the press story going unreported.
In May, four reporters were banned from Guantanamo Bay after reporting the already-public name of a witness (one of them, Carol Rosenberg, was on NPR this morning). As Spencer Ackerman wrote at the time, the ban wasn't the result of a court order but was, instead, a policy decision by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the four weren't the only ones who had reported the witness' name. Now their publications may sue the Obama administration.
Precisely what reporters have access to is where First Amendment rights get complicated, but it's always been clear that court proceedings, even military proceedings, are open to the public. When reporters do not report the names of those involved in a case, which in civilian cases usually occurs in the case of alleged rape victims, it's due to individual newspapers' policy or by agreement. For the most part, it's the job of the government and other institutions to keep private the names and facts they want to keep private, but if a reporter finds out the name of a witness, it's definitely not illegal to report it. As Nick Baumann writes in the MotherJones the post linked above:
Statutory law and the Constitution are both fairly clear on press freedom at Guantanamo. The Military Commissions Act expressly says that the proceedings are supposed to be open to the public -- and, of course, the press. More important, the Supreme Court has held that reporters have a first amendment constitutional right to legal proceedings and certain types of government documents. In fact, the Rosenberg ban -- which also affected the Toronto Star's Michelle Shephard, the Globe & Mail's Paul Koring, and Canwest's Steve Edwards -- was "so clearly across" that line, Schulz said, that it forced Defense Department lawyers to negotiate rule changes with the media "because they wouldn't want to defend this in court."
This is extremely frustrating from a freedom-of-the-press standpoint, because Obama had pledged such transparency in his administration. All reporters want are clear rules and standard processes to follow at Guantanamo. It's sad that it might take a court challenge, an expensive, time-consuming undertaking, to get them.
-- Monica Potts
