Miami Herald editor blasts unprecedented 'culture of censorship' at Guantanamo Bay

[Newsjock]

http://jimromenesko.com/2014/04/09/miami-herald-editor-blasts-a-culture-of-censorship-at-guantanamo-bay/

Secretary Hagel:

From March 17-21 four Miami Herald journalists visited your detention center at Guantanamo Bay and conducted a reporting trip under new expansive ground rules that forbade the media that week from photographing the faces of anyone but the detention center commander, his spokesman and the contractor in charge of catering.

Under these new more restrictive ground rules, written by the public affairs officer and adopted by the U.S. Southern Command, my journalists were forbidden to report the names of any other members of the 2,100-member staff of JTF GTMO.

During their trip, two sergeants and a private introduced as “your operational security officers” systematically deleted any imagery that showed the face of any other member in a superstructure of censorship that portrayed any face, even those previously disclosed through public affairs imagery, as an operational security threat to the 13-year-old detention center. Their military escorts ordered them to photograph troops from the neck down, and forbade the soldiers we interviewed from giving their true names.

... Mr. Secretary, a culture of censorship has set in at Guantánamo of a scale we have not experienced in the past 13 years of reporting from there. Your troops are wielding editorial instruments on independent journalists with an ever-expanding interpretation of their power to influence the story of Guantanamo in the free press. And in doing so, the organization whose motto is “Safe, Humane, Legal, Transparent” detention is implementing a dishonest double standard that snuffs out the reporting of basic information the public was once allowed to know.

... Respectfully yours,
Aminda Marques Gonzalez
(Miami Herald executive editor)