Pentagon Premieres Terror Trial Movies

[n2doc]

By Spencer Ackerman November 10, 2011 | 11:08 am | Categories: Info War

Anyone looking to catch a movie at the on-base theater at Fort Meade, Md., home of the National Security Agency, couldn’t watch the regularly scheduled Dolphin Tale screening on Wednesday. Instead, they got the beginning of a war crimes trial for the suspected U.S.S. Cole bomber, beamed live from Guantanamo Bay. It’s the beginning of a Defense Department experiment in transparency.

Only it wasn’t very transparent.

Reporters who packed in to the 80-seat theater, “Escort Required” badges dangling from our necks, got a confusing set of directions. On the one hand, the big screen showed a live, glitch-free feed from Guantanamo’s courtroom, clear as the CCTV feed shown to reporters at Gitmo’s media center. No one has ever watched a military commission from the continental U.S. At Meade, with our laptops and phones, we were encouraged to blog and tweet away. The doors of the theater were open to the public.

On the other hand, we were warned that if we waved our phones aloft, we might violate the ban on simultaneous audio or visual broadcasts. Photography was a no-no: The only imagery I could snap on the super-secret Meade was the shot you see below. There’s no Wi-Fi in the theater, so blogging and tweeting depended on the sad, solitary bar on my iPhone catching Verizon 3G — but if I got caught using my phone, I might be kicked out. (It’s unclear!)

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http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/guantanamo-trial-fort-meade/