(Taylor Hall/MEDILL NSJI)

You’re going to Guantanamo.

There’s a war court hearing, you’re a journalism student and you’ve been selected to go.

For years you have associated this word – Guantanamo – with torture, and a queasy tightening in your chest. The physical reality of Guantanamo, the place, never really occurred to you before this moment. It always seemed light-years away, physically and metaphysically.

But there’s no time to process this or critically assess any of the assumptions you carry because now there’s an onslaught of forms to fill out, and you need to make a photocopy of your passport by noon or you won’t be guaranteed a spot on the chartered military flight.

“The Defense Department will facilitate media access to the maximum extent possible, in an effort to encourage open reporting and promote transparency,” one form reads.

Six paragraphs down: “the Department of Defense is the sole release authority for all military information contained in all media.”

Later: “Failure to comply with these ground rules could result in permanent expulsion… of the parent news organization from further access to GTMO or to military commissions.”

The rush of rules and dizzying down-is-up rationales has only just begun.

Hurriedly you read it and pen your initials to the 13 pages, effectively forfeiting your ability to talk to certain people (detainees, Haitian and Jamaican contract workers, others) and to take certain photos (of detainees, military personnel, gates, power supplies, security measures) in the name of national security. I should read this over more carefully later, and maybe with a lawyer, you think, knowing you won’t.

You have a week to prepare, so you read up on the detainee’s case, meet with Pentagon defense lawyers, study the history of the military commissions, watch a documentary about the detention camps, and buy some bug spray.

You brush up on the history. The U.S. scored the land for the Navy base in a deal with Cuba in 1903 for $2,000 in gold a year, and still pays a pittance in rent. Washington also made sure only it could terminate the agreement.

Then came the 9/11 attacks, the “war on terrorism” and the Navy base became home to the infamous Joint Task Force prison camps, which opened in 2002 to house those captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. In the early feverish days, there were more than 600 prisoners held there. Now the camps are down to 116 prisoners, the last of whom arrived in 2008.

Too soon the day arrives, and you’re waiting with your luggage in line at Andrews Air Force Base, not fully grasping that the men and women chatting freely in line with you wearing khaki shorts will soon transform into uniformed military legal teams, inevitably unavailable for comment.

Media board the flight first and sit cloistered in the back. You sit next to Carol Rosenberg, a Miami Herald reporter who has covered Guantanamo longer than anyone else.

She is working on the flight, striking up conversations. You listen.

Upon landing you are introduced to your military handlers for the week. They are white men in their thirties with young children back home. Most served in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are new to Guantanamo and will be here for nine months. They seem like good people, as military guards who read over your shoulder and decide which of your pictures to delete each day go.

You and your media colleagues work from a windowless room in an old converted warehouse where you assume (correctly, you think) that everything you say and do is monitored. There’s a key code to the door that only your military handlers know.

They give you a press badge emblazoned with a bold “M” and tell you to never take it off, even when you’re running or smoking or at dinner (all of which are necessarily accompanied by military handlers).

You ponder the Foucauldian panopticon nature of things for both detainees and media here, and reflect on the Joint Task Force Guantanamo motto: “Safe. Humane. Legal. Transparent.”

Your guards are, practically speaking, inescapable, but at least they are nice. You know they are just doing their job.

In a turn that comes unexpected to you (but not to Carol Rosenberg) you are informed Sunday evening that the military hearings you planned to cover Monday-Friday have been put on hold until Wednesday. You are given no explanation for the delay.

In the meantime, your military handlers scramble to find you things to do.

You ask to see the detention camps. The guards suggest snorkeling.

You visit many parts of Guantanamo in your non-commission downtime: the radio station, the windmills that power the self-sustaining base, the old lighthouse.

You marvel at the incredibly unremarkable quotidian nature of this small town base – surreal precisely because it is so normal.

You expected some sort of unsettling psychic footprint from the terrorist masterminds and torture incidence rate. Instead you eat fajitas and drink craft beer at the base’s Irish bar, O’Kelly’s. In your notes one night, you write that the dining experience was “average.”

The next morning you visit the original detention center that was tossed together to jail the first detainees back in 2002. Camp X-Ray, as it was known, was closed in April 2002 following outcry over human rights violations.

You are shown the old dog kennels, which were the only constructions in the camp with air conditioning. You walk through rows upon rows of empty chicken wire cages, once used to house America’s most wanted. You are told that nearly 300 men once lived in these 8 foot by 8 foot cells, and were confined for all but 30 minutes of recreation time each day. You explore the original interrogation and interview buildings. Like the other facilities in Camp X-Ray, they are now completely defunct and overgrown, but someone has moved all of the furniture from the small wooden buildings into one room, and now all the rotting chairs are idly stacked and overturned. You can’t help but wonder what conversations were had in these chairs. You pick rusty bullet casings out of the dry ground. When you ask about them, you are told they were probably used to teargas detainees.

You leave and go straight to McDonald’s for a McGriddle and a large iced caramel latte. The drive from the infamous detention camps to the familiar golden arches takes five minutes. There is nothing remarkable or ceremonious about your passage through these overlapping normal and (to you) non-normal worlds.

On Wednesday morning the hearings commence.

You’re given a choice. You can sit in court with pen and paper and watch in person from a glass observer box while audio is piped in on a 40-second delay. Or you can sit in the media hangar and watch the delayed feed on TV and have access to your laptop and the Internet.

You choose to go see the court.

It’s set up like a regular courthouse, except you can’t bring anything with an on/off switch inside, and there are chains on the ground near the defense tables for shackling prisoners down should they become ‘difficult.’ There is a cartoonishly large red light next to the judge, which you have been told could light up at any time if top-secret matters are accidentally discussed and they need to cut audio in the observer room where the media sit.

According to the Military Commissions Act of 2009, certain aspects of the Constitution do not apply in this court.

During the hearing you see Abd al Hadi al-Iraqi, alleged former senior commander of al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
The Mosul, Iraq native is accused of masterminding attacks on American, Canadian, German, British, Estonian and Norwegian forces.
He is also accused of ordering an attack on a medical helicopter attempting to recover casualties from the battlefield, providing a reward to the Taliban for assassinating a civilian United Nations worker, and destroying historic Buddha statues in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
He is wearing clean white traditional clothes and his beard is long and grey. His voice is deep and when he speaks he sounds collected, dignified, well educated. You hear another reporter describe him as “almost elegant.”

You have studied his track record of war crimes carefully. Shouldn’t you be registering some sort of visceral response as a result of being physically near someone allegedly responsible for such gratuitous cruelties? You don’t.

The hearing is a dizzying blur in legalese: you learn that the prosecution dumped new evidence on the defense team Sunday night that raised potential conflict of interest issues. In the middle of the hearing, Hadi announces he wants new temporary legal representation.

At one point, the judge and defense realize that they’ve been reading from different versions of the Commissions manual. Eventually, the military judge postpones the proceedings indefinitely until everything can be sorted out. You understand now how these things have managed to drag on for many years, with no end in sight.

With hearings canceled, there is even more time to kill.

You attend a “South of the Border” themed all-you-can-eat dinner event. A group of teenaged mariachis from Orlando performs. Someone at your table brings up how good the sailing is here this time of year.

As you drink a margarita, you remind yourself that six hours ago you sat within earshot of someone who took direct orders from Osama bin Laden.

Later, you get to see the holding areas where they keep the prisoners before they appear in court. There are body cavity searching chairs, which look sort of like grey plastic thrones and restraint chairs, which look like a cross between a hospital gurney and a straight jacket. The rooms are a cloying yellow that immediately gives you a headache. When you ask who chose the color, you are told that yellow is calming.

There is a grill outside. You ask if they grill often.

“We have to be here 24/7, so…” your tour guide says. You wonder how long it takes for Guantanamo’s non-normal and normal worlds to completely collapse in a way that is routinized and totally palatable.

As you board your return flight the next day you wonder – given all of the institutional roadblocks – how you could ever produce meaningful coverage that adequately reflects this place’s complexities and contradictions in a way that amounts to more than a been-there, done-that dispatch from a place where the U.S. appears to have no foreseeable exit strategy and most of the country seems to have moved on from.

Soon it will be time to chat with the men and women in their polo shirts and shorts who couldn’t talk to you when you were all in Guantanamo.

WASHINGTON – Faced with an upsurge in journalist kidnappings, President Barack Obama issued a new executive order in June that allows families to offer ransom money without fear of prosecution and establishes an interagency fusion cell to improve U.S. hostage recovery efforts.

Kidnappings of journalists are on the rise, up 35 percent in 2014 to 119 journalists, according to Reporters Without Borders’ most recent annual roundup of abuses against journalists. RWB also reported that 66 journalists were slain in 2014, bringing the number of journalists killed in connection with their work in the past 10 years to 720.

But how far do the changes go toward providing an effective solution to the bureaucratic tangle we’ve already spun when it comes to coordinating the return of kidnapped Americans?

The fusion cell is led by senior FBI official Michael McGarrity and housed at bureau headquarters. It is made up of officials from the FBI and departments of State, Treasury, Defense and Justice, as well as the Office of Director of National Intelligence and the CIA.

Marc and Debra Tice flew to Washington in June to meet with Obama to review his executive order revising U.S. hostage policy. Austin Tice, their son, is a freelance journalist who was kidnapped while reporting in Syria in August 2012.

Speaking just days after their meeting with the president, the Tices expressed frustration at the difficulties they personally faced navigating the complicated system while trying to find their son.

“We spent two years figuring out who do you call, who’s got responsibility, who’s got capabilities, who’s got the desire, so we had to find our way through Washington and the bureaucracy and these different agencies of the government by ourselves effectively,” Marc Tice said.

“All of these resources already exist,” added Debbie Tice. “What we are really asking for is more efficient, more effective, more economical stewardship of resources.” The Tices spoke of institutional roadblocks at both the macro and micro, day-to-day levels.

“He has got an apartment that he is running, how do we deal with that? He has got bank accounts and student accounts, a social media identity… there’s a whole ecosystem that we have to go through,” Marc said.

“Think about the bank account that has nothing going into it, and has automatic payments coming out. And how quickly that can become a huge issue that we can’t get our hands around,” said Debbie.

The Tices said it took the family over a year to figure out a legal authority to deal with this issue. They still have not been able to access Austin’s Twitter account, from which he last tweeted about spending the day at Free Syrian Army pool party on August 11, 2012.

A Defense Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity explained how circuitous government efforts between the White House, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the FBI, the Pentagon and the military services can be – especially when these agencies are all uniquely involved in different aspects of hostage recovery.

“Start with authority. Who has the authority to act for civilians?” the defense official said.

“One major criticism the Obama administration has faced is treating terrorism as a criminal activity,” he said. “Despite the ‘war on terrorism,’ we don’t treat it as a war, but as a crime.”

“If you’re in an Afghani combat zone, you’re DOD responsibility. Otherwise, you’re an FBI issue, unless you get a security order from the Secretary of Defense.

“So the FBI has the lead, but technically no overseas reach. You can only get there through the State Department and Department of Defense. And the FBI can’t tell DOD to do anything. And DOD would still need to get an execution order to do anything anyways.

“For the FBI, State and these agencies are peers – you can’t just tell them what to do. They would have to be told, pretty much, by the President. The CIA chain is just like State. They’d need presidential findings… they can’t just do a one-off. The DOD would need to call over to the Joint Staff, and then go to the Secretary of Defense for an execution order, but that can take 2 years.”

While the defense official lauded the enhanced support for hostages and their families, he criticized organizing the fusion cell under the umbrella of the FBI.

“The organization with the least reach is now entirely responsible for getting hostages home. So this could be seen as a huge slap in the face for families.”

Rep. Duncan Hunter, R- Calif., has advocated for displacing the FBI from its traditional leadership role in hostage negotiations.

“The problem is…in Iraq, there is no FBI. In Syria, there’s no FBI. In Afghanistan, there’s no FBI. In war zones, you don’t have the FBI,” Hunter said in May, discussing an amendment to the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act on the House floor.

“What you have is the Department of Defense and different intelligence agencies. [They] are the ones who track the networks, know the networks, know who the bad guys are, know where the hostages may be and then, in case we actually get good intelligence, the Department of Defense and our intelligence communities, those are the people that would act on the intelligence, not the FBI.”

Chris Voss, former lead FBI hostage negotiator, had a different take.

“The issue is in agencies putting the right people in the right places, and they’ve now designated the right places. In kidnapping issues, the actual authority and responsibility rests with the FBI, which is in charge of investigating murders and kidnappings overseas. Moving the coordination to that effort over to the FBI makes more sense, and elevates responsibility to FBI to a higher level.”

Voss said that now the overall coordination should be easier and quicker because of the higher level of authority involved – “but it still comes down to the level of expertise of the person in the position. Did the people involved with the government do a very poor job over the past two years?”

“In all these ISIL instances, there’s been a complete absence of any evidence of government subject matter expertise. It’s time for the government to take a hard look at the people doing the jobs and see if they’re up to the task. And there’s no evidence that they are.”

Flags fly at half mast at Joint Task Force Guantanamo’s Camp Justice, July 22, 2015 (Taylor Hall/Medill NSJI)

NAVAL BASE GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — It has been more than 3,000 days since alleged al-Qaida commander Abd al Hadi al-Iraqi was transferred to the U.S. military’s detention facility here.

And new complications this week have further tangled the web of his already Gordian war-court proceedings and will extend his stay at least two more months.

In 2013, congressional Democrats estimated the cost of housing one detainee for one year at the prison camp to be $2.7 million, based on Defense Department figures.

Hadi, a native of Mosul, Iraq, faces life in prison, accused of masterminding a series of attacks on American, Canadian, German, British, Estonian and Norwegian forces, including a 2003 attack on a U.S. military convoy at Shkin, Afghanistan, that killed two U.S. soldiers and injured numerous others.

After another one of his attacks on Oct. 25, 2003, killed two more U.S. soldiers, Hadi’s fighters shot at injured coalition soldiers, according to the charges against him.

He is also accused of attacking civilians and a medical helicopter attempting to recover casualties from the battlefield; directing fighters to kill all coalition soldiers and take no prisoners; providing a reward to the Taliban for assassinating a civilian United Nations worker; acting on orders from Osama bin Laden; attempting to assassinate then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf; and destroying historic Buddha statues in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

A pretrial hearing for Hadi that was originally scheduled to begin July 20 and last about a week and a half has been slipped to Sept. 14.

This week’s hearings in Guantanamo got off to a rough start when, two hours prior to a scheduled chambers meeting Sunday, lead government prosecutor Army Lt. Col. David Long turned over 10 pages of evidence from jailhouse conversations in 2007 between Hadi and a Sept. 11 defendant also imprisoned at Guantanamo, Mustafa al Hawsawi.

Hadi’s lead defense lawyer, Marine Lt. Col. Thomas Jasper, said these conversations included information that was adverse to his client.

The prosecution apparently intended to include information from the conversation between Hadi and Hawsawi to prove Hadi was an “unprivileged enemy belligerent,” a label used by the government to determine jurisdiction of war crimes cases, limiting them to the military courts in Guantanamo.

When Hadi’s defense lawyers asked for more time to review the evidence they received Sunday — less than one day before the military hearings were scheduled to begin — the judge, Navy Capt. J.K. Waits, delayed the hearings for two days to give the defense a chance to determine the scope of potential conflict-of-interest issues.

“It is not the prosecution’s job to do conflicts analysis for counsel,” chief prosecutor Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins said Friday when asked about the reason for the delayed submission of evidence. “We take our discovery obligation very seriously. We are producing it as we find it and prepare it.”

In court Wednesday morning, Waits scolded the prosecution for the delay in submitting evidence — waiting less than one day before the military hearings were scheduled to begin.

“Promptly means promptly,” Waits said. “I didn’t think that was subject to interpretation.”

Jasper, Hadi’s top Pentagon-paid defense lawyer, said two days was not enough time to weed through all the complex conflict-of-interest issues resulting from the new evidence stemming from the chats between Hawsawi and Hadi.

One such issue: It turns out the two alleged war criminals have a defense lawyer in common, at least on paper — Marine Lt. Col. Sean Gleason.

Gleason became Hadi’s first defense attorney after he arrived at Guantánamo in 2007 in an ongoing churn of attorneys through the on-again, off-again war court’s bar.

According to Jasper, Hadi had not properly released Gleason when the Pentagon’s chief defense counsel assigned him to help defend Hawsawi in the 9/11 case. Now the evidence concerning one could be used against the other, which Jasper said posed ethical issues that could complicate future proceedings for the entire defense team.

Hadi spoke to the military judge directly about his concerns. “Attorney Gleason has lots of information concerning me. I don’t know if he’s gong to use this information in the future for me or against me,” he said in Arabic through a translator Wednesday.

The process for releasing defense counsel from representation for a military commission client includes formal dismissal by both military judge and detainee client.

Though Gleason has not represented Hadi in court since being detailed to Hawsawi’s case, the commission now seeks to determine whether he was properly and formally released.

Waits agreed there was a potential conflict for Gleason in representing both Hawsawi and Hadi and said that issue must be resolved, but ruled an hour into the hearing that proceedings could continue because Hadi’s current lawyers were conflict-free.

But Hadi protested, raising new objections.

“Right now I have a very disturbed relationship with my attorneys,’’ he said of his Pentagon-funded defense team, Jasper and Air Force Maj. Ben Stirk.

“I don’t want them to represent me at this time,” Hadi added, citing frustrations over the number of attorneys assigned to work with him on his case over the years.

Hadi said he wants the option of using an independent counsel not assigned by the military — a request he has made before — but agreed to first meet with Gleason.

Both U.S. military defense and prosecution attorneys have come and gone from Hadi’s case. Army Reserve Col. Chris Callen represented Hadi at his June 2014 arraignment, and was replaced by Jasper in September. Stirk, a deputy defense counsel, has been the only defense lawyer to appear at all five of Hadi’s hearings.

Wednesday’s hearing also marked the debut of Felice Viti of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Utah, a new federal attorney who prosecuted the Elizabeth Smart kidnap and rape case. But Viti never uttered a word amid the flurry of conflict issues raised by the defense.

At the end of the hearing Wednesday, Waits put the proceedings on indefinite hold until a meeting between Hadi and Gleason could be arranged.

Though prosecutor Navy Lt. Col. Vaughn Spencer told the military judge Gleason is an active-duty Marine and could be contacted “as quickly as you direct us,” Guantanamo court officials began to book return flights for Saturday as soon as they realized Gleason, not present in Guantanamo this week, could not be located.

Gleason’s email auto-response says he is out of the office until Aug. 7.

On Friday, Martins, the chief prosecutor, said he did not know where Gleason is.

“I won’t in any way try to say that what we’re doing is setting land-speed records,” Martins said of the effort to locate Gleason and facilitate a meeting with Hadi. “We’re making incremental progress. The judge is going to sort out the facts of representation. And counsel have an obligation to make sure they’re representing the client’s interests.”

When asked about the costs of rescheduling the Hadi hearings, which included more than a dozen witnesses for the scheduled 10-day military commission’s version of a show-cause hearing in Guantanamo, Martins said: “These are really important cases. It’s easy to do comparative cost figures and fail to see how important it is to get national security right and fairness right.”

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A painting shows U.S. and Cuban flags flying outside of the Guantanamo Bay Lighthouse Museum.

NAVAL BASE GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — Normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba will not immediately impact the American naval base at Guantanamo, officials said this week.

In other words, for now, it’s business as usual.

Cuban flags were hoisted Monday at the Cuban embassy and at the State Department in Washington, marking the end of over 50 years of ruptured diplomatic relations going back to 1961, when those relations were abruptly severed.

But at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay — on the far opposite end of Cuba from where the U.S. embassy in Havana has re-opened for full diplomatic business — it was as if nothing unusual had happened.

“There’s no impact on the base at this point. We’re continuing to execute our mission here,” said Kelly Wirfel, public affairs officer for the base, the U.S. Navy’s oldest overseas outpost.

“Those discussions for the normalization of relations are all at a higher level than what is happening here in Guantanamo Bay,” Wirfel said.

Those sentiments were echoed by Capt. Christopher Scholl, director of public affairs for the Joint Task Force in Guantanamo Bay, which operates independently of the naval base.

“Nothing is changed for us,” Scholl said.

Havana has repeatedly called for the return of the Guantanamo base, leased to the U.S. in 1903.

In a 1934 treaty reaffirming the lease, Cuba granted trade partners free access through the bay and added a requirement that the termination of the lease requires the consent of the U.S. and Cuban governments, or the abandonment of the base by the U.S.

When diplomatic relations were officially restored Monday, Cuban foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez repeated the country’s request for the “return of the illegally occupied territory of Guantanamo, full respect for Cuban sovereignty and compensation of our people” in order to move the relationship forward.

But Secretary of State John Kerry, who will travel to Havana on Aug. 14 to raise the American flag over the U.S. Embassy, later said: “At this time, there is no discussion and intention on our part … to alter the existing lease treaty or other arrangements with respect to the naval station in Cuba.

“We understand Cuba has strong feelings about it,” Kerry went on. “I can’t tell you what the future will bring.”

Wirfel said the topic of returning the base to Cuba had not been broached in any way with the base commander, Capt. David Culpepper.

These days, the U.S. Navy holds monthly fence-line meetings with the Cuban frontier brigade. The sessions are held in converted Marine barracks near the 17.4 mile-long security fence. Culpepper conducts the administrative meetings to discuss upcoming scheduled drills with the Cuban representatives.

In June, the Navy conducted a bilateral exercise with Cuban medical responders and emergency services, practicing for the possibility of a fire or accident along the fence line. During these annual exercises, medical responders are allowed to cross over the fence lines, but can’t enter into town.

Wirfel said the base also is preparing to participate next year in Integrated Advance, an exercise to prepare for a “mass migration event.”

In the 1990s, the base conducted Operation Sea Signal, providing humanitarian assistance to 50,000 Cuban and Haitian migrants who flocked to Guantanamo following political and social upheaval in their countries.

“Certainly the naval station … plays a huge role in a lot of things that happen in the Caribbean,” Wirfel said.

While the Navy’s mission will remain unchanged for now, unexpected shifts in daily life soon may ripple across the base.

Foreign contract workers on the base today are mainly Filipinos and Jamaicans. Before relations were cut off with Cuba, those jobs were filled by Cuban workers. If relations continue to improve, the base’s contractor workforce may see more Cubans.

Another change: Now, children born on the base are not immediately considered U.S. citizens, and must apply for a consular birth report abroad through the U.S. Embassy in Jamaica. When the U.S. Embassy in Havana is fully operational, American diplomats there may take over this role.

While the relationship between the U.S. and Cuba thaws, at least in terms of civilian travel to Havana, the limbo for sailors stationed at Guantanamo Bay — who are restricted to the 45-square-mile base and are prohibited from traveling into Cuba itself — remains.

“I’ve never, of course, been into Cuba,” Wirfel said. “But I’ve heard it’s beautiful.”

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Flags fly at half mast at Joint Task Force Guantanamo’s Camp Justice, July 22, 2015 (Taylor Hall/Medill NSJI)

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, CUBA — Military court hearings ground to an indefinite halt Wednesday after an Iraqi prisoner accused of war crimes petitioned for a new lawyer, citing conflict of interest issues.

At the start of Wednesday’s proceedings, the military judge, Navy Capt. J.K. Waits asked Abd al Hadi al Iraqi, accused of leading violent attacks as a senior al-Qaida commander in 2003, whether he wanted to be represented by his current defense counsel, Marine Lt. Col. Tom Jasper and Air Force Maj. Ben Stirk. Hadi, dressed in traditional white garb, responded: “Today, yes.”

But less than one hour later, the Iraqi prisoner had changed his tune.

“I don’t want to confer with Jasper or Stirk about this at least temporarily until I have an option for an independent counsel. I don’t want them to represent me at this time,” al Hadi said through his translator.

The conflict of interest issue and representation for Hadi emerged Sunday, when the lead government prosecutor, Army Lt. Col. David Long, turned over evidence of jailhouse conversations in 2007 between Hadi and a Sept. 11 defendant also imprisoned at Guantanamo, Mustafa al Hawsawi. The prosecution apparently intended to include information from the conversation between Hadi and Hawsawi to prove Hadi was an “unprivileged enemy belligerent.”

But Hawsawi and Hadi, it turns out, have a defense lawyer in common — Marine Lt. Col. Sean Gleason.

Jasper, the lead military defense attorney, said Gleason, previously detailed to Hadi’s defense team, was not properly released by Hadi from his case.

“With regard to Gleason, it was only today I realized he’s still working in my case. And that was based on what I heard from Jasper today. Before that I had the wrong information,” Hadi said in court. “I’ve been working with Jasper based on the wrong information.”

Jasper said this posed critical conflict of interest issues that could complicate future proceedings for the entire defense team.

“We’re flying by the seat of our pants trying to figure out our ethical obligations regarding the ethical representation of Hadi,” Jasper said.

Hadi has asked for a civilian lawyer, but is not automatically entitled to one under the rules for military commissions because his is not a capital case.
In the hearing Wednesday, Hadi spoke directly to the military judge, Waits, expressing concerns over information shared with Gleason and fair representation by current defense counsel.

“I understand the privileged relationship between attorney and client. But there’s an important issue. Attorney Gleason has lots of information concerning me. I don’t know if he’s gong to use this information in the future, for me or against me,” Hadi said.

“Right now I have a very disturbed relationship with my attorneys. I can give you many examples,” he added.

One of the military prosecutors, Navy Lt. Col. Vaughn Spencer, challenged the extent of the conflict around the conversations, which took place before either Hadi or Hawsawi had legal representation or faced any charges. But Waits ruled to delay the hearings until Hadi had a chance to speak with Gleason about conflict issues that could adversely affect his case.

“The issue of a potential conflict with Gleason needs to be resolved,” Waits said. “The commission directs Jasper to contact Gleason to consult with Hadi. If you want independent counsel, that’s your prerogative.”

Waits directed the government prosecutors to keep the courts informed on the status of meetings between Gleason with Hadi and Hawsawi.

Hadi has temporarily dismissed Jasper and Stirk, and Waits recessed the military hearings indefinitely until Gleason, who was not present at Guantanamo this week, can be consulted.

Prosecutor Navy Lt. Col. Vaughn Spencer told the military judge Gleason is an active duty Marine and could be contacted “as quickly as you direct us.”

Until then, military court proceedings in Guantanamo will remain on hold.

“Regrettably, we’re in a little bit of a limbo,” Waits said.

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Lt. Col. Tom Crosson, a Defense Department  spokesman, said Monday the Pentagon will not comment on why the military commission judge, Navy Capt. J.K. Waits, has delayed the start time of the first session  this week.

Reasons  for delaying hearings run the gamut from natural disasters to last-minute legal disclosure of new evidence that could complicate the hearing, a Guantanamo defense attorney said.

Military commission personnel will  meet Tuesday to review scheduling for the pre-trial hearings, which are not expected to begin before Wednesday morning. The Guantanamo Review Task Force recommended Hadi for prosecution in January 2010.

Hadi, one of Guantanamo’s remaining high-level detainees, is charged with conspiring and leading a string of violent attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2001 to 2006.

The Mosul, Iraq native is accused of  attacking civilians and also medical helicopter  attempting to recover casualties from the battlefield; directing fighters to kill all coalition soldiers and take no prisoners; providing a reward to the Taliban for assassinating a civilian United Nations worker; acting on orders from Osama bin Laden; attempting to assassinate then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf; and destroying historic Buddha statues in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Hadi allegedly instructed fighters to dress in local attire in order to blend in with the civilian population , and instructed them to videotape attacks and victims’ deaths for use in al-Qaida propaganda films. He is accused of masterminding a series of attacks on American, Canadian, German, British, Estonian and Norwegian forces, including a 2003 attack on a U.S. military convoy at Shikin, Afghanistan, that killed two U.S. soldiers and injured numerous others. After another one of his attacks on Oct. 25 2003 killed two more U.S. soldiers, Hadi’s fighters shot at injured coalition soldiers, according to the charges against him.

The pre-trial hearings scheduled this week will hinge on defense motions related to Hadi’s status as an unlawful enemy combatant, a term used by the U.S. government to denote status of unlawful combatants without protections under the Geneva Conventions.  (Is that change OK?)

If the prosecution proves that Hadi is entitled to prisoner-of-war status, the jurisdiction of his case will be limited to the military commissions at Guantanamo, rather than federal court.

Three defense motions on the table this week relate to Hadi’s conspiracy charges, which have come under fresh scrutiny in the wake of a recent 2-to-1 panel opinion by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia against Ali Hamza Ahmad Suliman Al Bahlul.

Bahlul’s 2008 “inchoate conspiracy” conviction was overturned because the commission at Guantanamo did not have authority to convict him of a conspiracy charge according to the law of war on Article III grounds, the panel wrote.

On Sunday, the chief prosecutor in the Hadi case, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, said the military commission judge may defer judgment on the conspiracy charges in order to see if the D.C. circuit opinion will remain final, or be petitioned again by the government en banc by July 27. Martins also noted the two cases should not be conflated.

“There’s a strong doctrine of also considering individual cases. Bahlul’s not exactly the same as Hadi. They’re slightly differently situated before the law and before the court,” Martins said.

Martins addressed questions of whether the Bahlul decision may challenge the future of Guantanamo’s military commissions, calling these opinions “both overstated and myopic.”

“Regardless of the government’s decision, military commissions will continue moving toward trial in its seven ongoing cases,” he said Sunday. “We’re not even in the controversial area of law in how we’ve been charging.”

If Hadi is present should the hearings proceed Wednesday as planned, it will be the first time he has appeared in court since judge Navy Capt. J.K. Waits rescinded his “no-touch” order for female guards in March.

Previously, Guantanamo Bay obliged Hadi’s demand that female guards not be permitted to touch him, citing his adherence to Islam as justification on grounds of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Capt. Waits said the overturned appeal resulted from a need for a well-functioning facility and elimination of gender discrimination.

If Hadi is convicted, he faces life in prison, distinct from other active prosecutions at the Guantanamo war court in the Sept. 11 and USS Cole terror attacks which seek military execution.

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Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has been in his position for five months. The Senate Armed Services Committee is reviewing President Barack Obama’s nomination of Gen. Joseph Dunford as chairman of the joint chiefs and Gen. Paul Selva as second in command as well as upcoming nominations for new service chiefs for the Navy, Army and Marine Corps.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on Tuesday said the new Pentagon leadership faces “the most diverse and complex array of global crises since the end of WWII.”

But Dunford — who would become the highest-ranking member of the United States Armed Forces and principal adviser to the President on military strategy — made headlines last week by testifying that Russia posed the greatest potential threat to America. On Tuesday, Selva appeared before the committee and reiterated the position that the Russia presents the number one threat to the country – ahead of China, North Korea, Iran and the Islamic State.

Dunford described Russian nuclear capabilities as “nothing short of alarming.”

After Dunford’s hearing, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest quickly distanced Obama from the general’s Russia comments, saying that they reflected Dunford’s own views and “not the consensus analysis of the president’s national security team.”

When Selva said the same thing, his comments seemed to catch off guard some members of the Senate Armed Services Committee who have spent the last 14 years scrambling to fund counterinsurgency operations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Is that opinion held by most of our military upper echelon?” asked Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. “We’re not hearing an awful lot of dialogue about this relationship or lack of relationship, and now two of our top people who basically are on the verge of being nominated to lead our military forces have identified it, and not hearing anything before, I think it kind of caught all of us by surprise.”

When McCain, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, asked Selva why he ranked Russia — and China, and Iran, and North Korea — ahead of the Islamic State, the Air Force general said, “Because right now ISIS does not present a clear and present threat to our homeland and to the existence of our nation. It is a threat we must deal with and we must help our regional partners deal with, but it does not threaten us at home.”

In June, current Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey updated the National Military Strategy for the first time since 2011, writing about challenges posed by state actors, naming Russia’s “hybrid warfare” and China’s aggressive land reclamation.

On the dawning of a nuclear Iran deal heralded by the White House, Selva said he viewed Iran as the leading state sponsor of terror, and that sanction relief for Iran would give it more economic resources to fund terrorist groups.

“I am opposed to Iranians possessing a nuclear weapon,” Selva said. When asked whether he would stand by his claims in 15 years, Selva clarified: “Ever. We need to have a range of available options with which to respond” to possible threats from Iran, the general said.

Selva and Dunford both noted that continued military and diplomatic cooperation with nations like Russia and China are critical to diffusing the threat they pose.

If confirmed as expected before Congress’s recess in August, Selva and Dunford will together lead the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Much has been made of the “meteoric” ascents through the ranks of both men. The 59-year-old Dunford, who served as the top American officer and coalition commander in Afghanistan during the 2013-2014 transition period when Afghan forces took over operations from American troops and is currently the commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, rose in just over three years from a single-star brigadier general to four-star rank.

Selva, head of U.S. Transportation Command since May 2014, spent less than two years before that as leader of the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command and a year as vice commander with Pacific Air Forces. While former assistant to then-Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen, Selva also served as military assistant to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Some say Selva’s time as Clinton’s military adviser that has positioned him well to become vice chairman, and a likely candidate for the chairman’s job if Clinton is elected president in 2016.

The last time the Senate Armed Services Committee saw current Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, the senators slammed the Defense Department leadership and criticized the administration’s strategy against the Islamic State as ineffective and delayed.

If confirmed, Dunford and Selva could be back on Capitol Hill this fall to answer similar tough questions and criticism about the ongoing Iraq campaign, integration of women into combat roles, military support for Syrian rebels and Ukrainian forces, as well as the Pacific “pivot,” high-tech cyber and space threats, and the ongoing conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and across the Middle East and Africa.

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WASHINGTON – Bill Graham had just boarded a United Airlines flight to Boston at Washington Dulles International Airport when United experienced an airline-wide computer glitch, grounding 3,500 flights nationwide.

“We were sitting on the plane and the technology went down for all of United,” said Graham, who said he waited over two hours on the tarmac before passengers were allowed to get off the plane. “Everyone was pissed.”

Graham added he was thankful his flight was not in the air when the technology shutdown happened.

A technology executive from Washington, Graham missed the business meeting he was scheduled to attend because of delays associated with the flight grounding. To avoid long lines for flight waivers at Dulles, Graham rebooked another flight himself out of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

“Because I guess that’s the best option. So I drove here and now I hope this flight’s on time,” Graham said.

Around 9:30 a.m. the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control command center issued a ground stop for United flights due to an automation issue. Thirty minutes later, the FAA lifted the ground stop and said that that the automation issue had been resolved.

But the effects were already being felt in the flight cancellations and delays rippling across the country.

A contractor who handles baggage for United Airlines at Reagan and spoke on the condition of anonymity said gate agents for United wrote out tickets and luggage tags by hand while computer systems were down.

Customers in the United line at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport said they were “absolutely concerned” about flying the same day as the massive glitch, and were skeptical that a computer glitch could have had such a massive effect.

“I was so nervous when I watched the TV and heard the news,” said Erica Gill, a D.C. resident in line to check in for a flight to Detroit. “But I don’t know about the computer glitch. I know they’re a major corporation. But they had enough connectivity to tweet out that they were delayed. I don’t know how much I believe them.”

In a statement, United confirmed this wasn’t a hacking or cyberattack, and said it would issue flight waivers for passengers affected by grounded flights.

“We experienced a network connectivity issue this morning. We are working to resolve this and apologize to our customers for any inconvenience,” a United spokesperson said.

At 8:43 a.m., United tweeted “We’re recovering from a network connectivity issue & restoring flight ops. We’ll have a waiver on united.com to change flights.”

Brynn Olson, a Navy public affairs officer whose United flight from D.C. to Houston was delayed an hour and a half, worried about the sensitivities of airline computer systems.

“I’m surprised that computers shut down the whole thing, but I guess that’s today’s world,” said Olson, who said she learned of the flight grounding and delays not from the airline, but from TV and radio reports.

“You’ve got a computer-based system, and everything’s done over electronics today, so it wouldn’t be unrealistic,” said Greg Bamford, a Marine helicopter pilot flying United to Alaska, about the computer glitch.

While the check-in lines for United at Reagan dwindled by midday, aviation experts said that delays could have a snowball effect triggering flight delays for other airlines, and that resuming normal operations may take 48 hours.

“I think after a while it becomes like the boy who cried wolf, because every year you keep making these announcements and we don’t see any attack,” said Colin Clarke, an associate political scientist who researches counterterrorism and the Middle East at RAND Corporation.

Clarke noted that the routine nature of the annual warnings is “not necessarily reassuring.”

This week, the Department of Homeland Security, FBI and National Counterterrorism Center issued a joint intelligence bulletin to law enforcement across the U.S. warning of threats from extremists tied to Independence Day.

“They can’t not put out a warning, even if they have no indication of increased threat,” said former FBI senior official Christopher Voss. “If an attack occurs, they would have no defense for not putting out a warning.”

Voss, Clarke and other homeland security experts said these raised alerts could be less about safeguarding the public than making certain that the government is on the record about the seriousness of the threat should something happen.

“What’s the alternative? Not take these things seriously then have something happen? If it ends up being overblown, I’ll take that 10 times out of 10 over the alternative,” said Clarke.

But the experts also agreed that Independence Day presents unique conditions ripe for an enhanced threat.

“Prominent occasions on which large crowds can be expected to gather, as is true of Independence Day–which, of course, also has prominence as the national day of the United States–are always inviting targets for terrorists,” said Paul Pillar, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

And a DHS official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said, “We have seen repeatedly calls for violence over the past year by leadership and supporters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant against members of the military and military installations, law enforcement, the U.S. government, and the American public. These threats are always taken seriously and we continue to work with state and local law enforcement to ensure their safety.”

Edward Clark, homeland security expert and principal consultant for Executive Interface, LLC, a security consulting group, said the psychological impact of a terrorist attack on Independence Day cannot be underestimated.

“When you kill five Americans on August 5 it’s a tragedy. When you kill five Americans on July 4, it’s a national travesty,” Clark said.
He also said increasing security may reduce the consequences should an attack occur.
“Our security system is the thing we have the most control over, so that’s where we direct our efforts,” said Clark.

But the added anticipation of threat could lead to false alarms. Thursday’s Washington Navy Yard incident highlighted the preparedness to respond to potential threat attacks — or even non-attacks.

Reports of possible gunshots triggered a massive law enforcement response at the U.S. Navy’s oldest shore establishment, where ultimately no evidence of a shooter or shooting were found according to the Washington Metropolitan Police Department.

“Pre-holiday nervousness about terrorism in the nation’s capital may have contributed to a false alarm and over-reaction in that incident,” said Pillar.

Clarke, the Rand official, added that the 2013 Navy Yard shooting incident, in which 13 were killed, and the Islamic State attacks across the world have created a “perfect storm” of pre-July 4 anticipatory edge.

The political scientist also noted that challenges with verifying threats made on social media distinguish this year’s July 4 terror risk from years past.

“How do we verify this person is who they say they are, or that they’re going to do what they say they’re going to do?” said Clarke.

“… You’ve heard the phrase ‘needle in a haystack,’ But with social media, we’re now looking for a needle in a needlestack.”

John McLaughlin, former CIA deputy director who is now a scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s strategic studies center, said the “ever-present potential for surprise” is likely a reason for the alerts but noted terrorists operate on their own timelines.

“They tend to strike when they are ready, when they have done the reconnaissance and prepared the work,” he said, “seldom on a schedule driven by particular dates.”

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WASHINGTON – Senators grilled Office of Personnel Management Director Katherine Archuleta Thursday on details of the fallout from her agency’s massive data breach.

“Do you understand the full gravity?” Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., asked Archuleta at a Senate Homeland Security hearing on cybersecurity. “It’s hard to overstate the seriousness of this breach. OPM has been hacked five times in the last three years, and has still not responded to effectively secure its networks.”

Earlier this month, OPM, the human resources agency for the federal government, announced that 4.2 million current and former government employees had been affected by a breach of personnel records databases containing Social Security numbers, birthdates and addresses.

OPM is still conducting an investigation on another related cyber intrusion affecting background forms of people with security clearance. These forms contain a wealth of sensitive data, such as mental health and sexual history, as well as information about friends, spouses, family members and interactions with foreign nationals. The cause of this breach is still unclear.

Andy Ozment, assistant secretary for cybersecurity and communications for the Homeland Security Department, said it’s possible, if unlikely, that hackers were able to manipulate the security background information, including the addition or removal of derogatory information.

Earlier this month, FBI director James Comey estimated that 18 million people were affected by this second breach including those who applied for federal jobs but never actually worked for the government.

Archuleta said she did not feel comfortable confirming that 18 million represents the total number of individuals affected.

But she said. “It may well increase from these initial reports.”

Archuleta skirted questions about OPM’s timeline for producing a total number of individuals affected, or what the agency would do to protect those affected from tax fraud.

On Thursday, Archuleta said she will hire a new cybersecurity expert to report directly to her. She said she plans to meet in upcoming weeks with private sector cybersecurity experts to discuss best practices.

In the wake of the breach, the Office of Management and Budget launched a 30-day review team to analyze and recommend federal cybersecurity strategies.

Throughout the hearing, Archuleta reiterated that improvements at OPM led to the discovery of the breaches.

“You are responsible,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.,, to Archuleta. “I must say, I’ve seen a lot of performances, and yours’ ranks as one of the most interesting.”

“Do you think you should stay in your current position?” McCain pressed. Archuleta said she has been “working hard.”

OPM Inspector General Patrick McFarland raised new concerns in a recent audit on OPM’s management of infrastructure improvement.

The inspector general said Thursday OPM has ignored his recommendations for risk assessment. In the agency’s rush for damage control, he said proper project management procedures, like creating a business plan, were not followed.

“It may sound counterintuitive, but OPM must slow down and get it right the first time. OPM cannot afford to have this project fail,” McFarland said.

“That is a significant failure,” said Joni Ernst, R-Iowa. “That something as simple as a business plan cannot be produced for this is a failure.”

When asked to clarify whether the attacks are, in fact, over, given that it has taken months for the agency to detect previous ongoing breaches, Archuleta was unable to provide a clear answer.

“We’re trying really hard,” Archuleta said.

“That’s not the same as having knowledge the attacks are over,” said Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb.

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