When Judge Kohlmann asked Mr. Shibh why he was taking the medication, security officials cut the sound fed to reporters in a glassed-in gallery and a satellite press center. It was one of half a dozen times in a long court day when a private national-security consultant to the court cut the sound when detainees appeared to be discussing what several of them said had been years of torture.who was the sound cut off from? you need to read much further in the article to find out: it was human rights and legal observers who sat in a separate room, separated by glass from the proceedings with a sound feed that had a twenty second delay.
the only legitimate basis for redacting testimony is national security. that's not what this is, at least not under the old definition of "national security." this is the military censoring testimony to avoid the release of information about the military and intelligence agencies' criminal behavior. it's not about avoiding information about troop movements from falling into the enemy's hands or the like, it's about suppressing evidence of its own misconduct.
and the remarkable thing is how unremarkably the censorship was presented in the NYT article. it mentioned the 20 second delay and cut microphone only in passing. behavior that used to be the hallmark of two-bit military dictatorships is now so routine, it's not worth drawing attention to that fact in the nation's premier newspaper.
