Prosecutor Says Hidden Microphones Weren't Recording

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Source: AP


The May 2012 arraignment in the long-stalled war crimes case was an unruly 13-hour spectacle, drawn out as the defendants refused to use the court translation system, ignored the judge and stood up to pray in court. The defendants sat out portions of this week's session. When they were in court, they remained largely silent. The lead defendant, self-professed terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, sat quietly at his defense table, wearing a military-style camouflage vest over his white robe.

This week's hearings largely dealt with fears by members of the five defense teams that the U.S. government has been eavesdropping on their private conversations, violating the core legal principal of attorney-client privilege.

Military officials confirmed that meeting rooms used by the attorneys have microphones apparently disguised to look like smoke detectors. They said, however, that the devices have no recording capability and have not been used to monitor private meetings that prisoners have with their lawyers or the Red Cross. Prosecutors agreed on Thursday to disconnect the devices.

Bormann and Mohammed attorney David Nevin said the defense is continuing to investigate whether there has been any eavesdropping, which they said undermines their ability to represent their clients and under some circumstances could be illegal.

The chief prosecutor, Army Brig. Gen Mark Martins, said that after looking into the matter and hearing this week's testimony he is confident that there wasn't any monitoring of the attorney's conversations with the defendants. "It's not happening and we can go forward," he told reporters after the hearing adjourned.

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I'm not so confident, myself.

One bizarre thing about following this particular story is that I haven't been able to print out any of Arun Rath's excellent reports from the PBS website.


What happens is, I print it, and gibberish comes out of the computer. The headline prints fine, and the rest is gibberish.

So, what I do, is I copy and paste it into our metro browser here, and then print it.

This has happened with all of Arun Rath's reports so far on the PBS site.

I was able to print out one of his reports from Public Radio Intenational's site for The World.

A colleague said, "You've got to get off of whatever list you're on."