Product Description
“Camp Justice” is a firsthand account of the surreal world of the Guantánamo terror trials—beyond the maze of concertina-wired fences and security checkpoints and inside the $12 million Expeditionary Legal Complex, where the decade-long contradictions between secrecy, security, and democracy have been built into America's most terrified courtroom.
United States v. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, et al. is purportedly an “open” and “public” proceeding, conducted by a military commission and governed by the rule of U.S. law. But access to the trial is severely limited, requiring an invitation from the Pentagon and the signing of a lengthy and open-ended nondisclosure agreement. Journalists observe the proceedings from within a soundproof chamber, where an audio feed of the trial in front of them is played at a 40-second delay, muted entirely when someone in the courtroom discloses classified information, which includes “any and all statements by the Accused,” whose experiences, observations, and thoughts are “presumptively classified.” Combined, these constraints make United States v. KSM perhaps the world's first legal proceeding to be both a secret trial and a show trial at the same time.
Journalist Mattathias Schwartz introduces readers to Pentagon press officers, attorneys, prosecutors, victims, and soldiers assigned to guard the Accused while raising critical questions about justifications for violence, the uses of secrecy, and the serving of justice. Does the trial at Guantánamo signify the end of the war on terror, or has it only just begun?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mattathias Schwartz contributes to the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Megawords, and other publications. His New Yorker story "A Massacre in Jamaica," on the extradition of Christopher "Dudus" Coke, won the 2011 Livingston Award for international reporting. He edited and published the twenty-one issue run of the Philadelphia Independent, a broadsheet newspaper. Some of his work can be found online at mattathiasschwartz.com.
United States v. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, et al. is purportedly an “open” and “public” proceeding, conducted by a military commission and governed by the rule of U.S. law. But access to the trial is severely limited, requiring an invitation from the Pentagon and the signing of a lengthy and open-ended nondisclosure agreement. Journalists observe the proceedings from within a soundproof chamber, where an audio feed of the trial in front of them is played at a 40-second delay, muted entirely when someone in the courtroom discloses classified information, which includes “any and all statements by the Accused,” whose experiences, observations, and thoughts are “presumptively classified.” Combined, these constraints make United States v. KSM perhaps the world's first legal proceeding to be both a secret trial and a show trial at the same time.
Journalist Mattathias Schwartz introduces readers to Pentagon press officers, attorneys, prosecutors, victims, and soldiers assigned to guard the Accused while raising critical questions about justifications for violence, the uses of secrecy, and the serving of justice. Does the trial at Guantánamo signify the end of the war on terror, or has it only just begun?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mattathias Schwartz contributes to the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Megawords, and other publications. His New Yorker story "A Massacre in Jamaica," on the extradition of Christopher "Dudus" Coke, won the 2011 Livingston Award for international reporting. He edited and published the twenty-one issue run of the Philadelphia Independent, a broadsheet newspaper. Some of his work can be found online at mattathiasschwartz.com.
