US military authorities have taken unusual steps to protect evidence in an espionage investigation at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, including classifying routine court documents and forcing visiting reporters to promise in writing not to ask about the case.
Air Force officers tried to close to the public a preliminary hearing for Senior Airman Ahmad I. al-Halabi, an Air Force translator facing 32 charges including espionage. His lawyers challenged the closure in the Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals, and the judges agreed to close only parts of the hearing that dealt with classified information.
Court staff refused to give out copies of the ruling, relying on Air Force officials to do so. The copies the Air Force released have signatures of court officials and telephone numbers of al-Halabi's defense lawyers blacked out.
The recommendations of the officer who presided over that hearing, Colonel Anne Burman, also are classified. Reporters traveling to the prison camp in Cuba this week were required to sign a pledge not to ask questions about the investigation.
Some secrecy is to be expected in the military's most high-profile espionage case in more than a decade. Military law experts say the Pentagon has gone to extreme lengths, however, to protect secrets in the cases of al-Halabi and the Army captain and civilian translator arrested on suspicion of espionage at the prison.
"The court clerk's signature is not a secret. Why would they black it out in this case? I can't understand that," said Kevin Barry, a Virginia lawyer who is a military law expert and former Coast Guard appeals court judge.
The Air Force did not even announce al-Halabi's July 23 arrest until two months afterward, when reporters learned about it from Pentagon sources.
Al-Halabi, a naturalized US citizen who worked as an Arabic translator at the prison camp, is accused of collecting secrets about the base and messages from prisoners with plans to transmit them to an unspecified enemy in his native Syria.
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