WASHINGTON — The Defense Department released a transcript on Wednesday of what it said was an exchange that had been censored from the public video feed of a military tribunal at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, this week. A military judge had ordered the excerpt made public.
The blocked comments came during a pretrial motions hearing on Monday in the case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other detainees accused of aiding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The episode was the first public indication that censors outside the courtroom were monitoring the live video from the tribunal and that they could cut the feed, which is delayed by 40 seconds before it can be viewed by the public and reporters.
During the censored portion, according to the transcript, David Nevin, a defense lawyer, was discussing whether arguments over a motion “will turn out to be closed or secret” regarding the preservation of evidence “at a detention facility,” an issue he said was “a critical matter to Mr. Mohammed” and “central to the case as far as he is concerned.”
The lawyers then became aware that a red light had gone on, indicating that the courtroom had been closed. But the button in the courtroom had not been hit by the only previously known censor, a security officer who sits near the judge, Col. James Pohl of the Army.
Mr. Nevin was apparently referring to the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret prisons in countries like Romania and Thailand where the agency once held the Sept. 11 defendants; the defense plans to argue that its clients should be spared execution because the C.I.A. tortured them. But Mr. Nevin did not mention such details, and his motion “to preserve evidence at any existing detention facility” was unclassified, Colonel Pohl said.
“If some external body is turning the commission off under their own view of what things ought to be, with no reasonable explanation,” the judge told government lawyers, “we are going to have a little meeting about who turns that light on or off.”
On Tuesday, Colonel Pohl read a government statement that said an “original classification authority” — apparently a reference to the C.I.A. — was also monitoring for disclosures of classified information. He insisted that the judge decided whether to close the courtroom.
It was not clear whether the offstage censors were at the base or watching remotely; the public feed is shown to reporters at Fort Meade in Maryland.
A military spokesman declined to comment.
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Transcript of Guantánamo Hearing Points to Outside Censors
