One of several journalists sent packing by U.S. military authorities at Guantanamo Naval Base last week has come out with her story of what happened when she and others were forced to leave. Carol J. Williams of The Los Angeles Times wrote in Sunday morning’s edition of the newspaper. The reporter complained of what she called “a Pentagon power play that muzzles already reluctant sources and an unceremonious expulsion to Miami on a military plane, safety-belted onto whatever seat is available.” She added that in her case, “that seat was the toilet.”
Ms. Williams said she ended up on that plane, on that seat, because of what she called “a baffling move by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s office, in which the only three newspaper reporters who managed to surmount Pentagon obstacles to covering the first deaths at Guantanamo were ordered off the base” last week.
The reporter for The Los Angeles Times said that “Rumsfeld’s gatekeepers have long made clear that they view outside scrutiny of the detention operations as a danger to the Bush administration’s secretive and often criticized campaign to indefinitely detain ‘enemy combatants.’ But this time, their actions seemed counterproductive because booting out the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald and Charlotte (N.C.) Observer only provoked fresh demands to learn what the government is hiding.”
The journalist who was kicked out of Guantanamo Bay last week by U.S. military authorities — referring to her job in reporting on the prison — said that “what little we learn often comes to light by accident, through casual slips-of-the-lips by military doctors, lawyers and jailers innocently oblivious of their superiors’ preference for spin.”
Carol Williams, who serves as the Caribbean bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times, pointed out that the ground rules say that in order to report on Guantanamo, journalists must agree not have any contact with detainees, “who are removed from sight at all but one camp during media tours.” She said that is why coverage on what is happening there is so important “in putting a human face on the prisoners, whose names and nationalities were only disclosed in March under a court order following an Associated Press legal challenge.”
The LA Times reporter said that some 450 prisoners have been held for years without charges or legal recourse. “Their indefinite detention to keep them off the global terrorism battlefields feels like a Muslim version of the World War II Japanese American internment.”
The article appearing in the newspaper yesterday concludes by saying that the thwarting of her mission to report on the U.S.-run prison at Guantanamo by expelling her and other reporters “make us all the more determined to question, probe and illuminate the actions of our government being waged in the country’s name.”
