Carol Rosenberg on the Past and Future of Guantanamo's Military Courts

0:06 Welcome to the Just Security Podcast. I'm your host, Tess Bridgeman, joined by co-host and my co-editor-in-chief, Ryan Goodman. Today, we're thrilled to welcome Carol Rosenberg, the veteran and multi-award-winning reporter who's been covering the Guantanamo Bay detention facility since it first opened in 2002 in the immediate aftermath of 9-11.

0:27 Carol has recently begun writing for Just Security a series of Guantanamo dispatches, which will keep our readers informed about the current trials starting to get underway at Guantanamo, including in the USS coal bombing case, which we'll be discussing with her today. Thanks so much, Carol. We're so glad to have you with us.

0:47 I thought I'd start just with a question that relates to your experience with Guantanamo from the very beginning to where we are today. And so you, in my understanding, have covered Guantanamo from the very start, post-9-11, that you were even on uh Guantanamo when the very first detainees arrived. And now, quote unquote, fast forward, I guess, 25 years later, a quarter of a century later, and only now are the trials even about to begin.

1:20 Um I'd just be, I think, great to hear from you and your perspective about what that kind of trajectory is like to be covering a court system from the inside out, and for such a period of time that under so many different administrations, kind of like what's changed dramatically, what hasn't changed dramatically, what's it like for a journalist, especially in the case of yourself?

1:44 You're oftentimes the only journalist that's covering some of these most historically important events. Just to give us that that arc, I think would be just a great way to start.

1:54 These, indeed, the first trials for the people who were brought here in 2006, the former CIA prisoners, they've had a court here off and on and fits and starts. And in fact, they set up early trials for the Al-Qaeda driver, cook, foot soldier, child soldier, and they they had intended to do material support to terror cases.

2:20 Um and in the first format, it was actually shut down by the Supreme Court, and they had to redo it, some would say twice. Um, and so what we are experiencing now are the national, true national security trials, the true trials that require uh a court like no other, in which I'll just cut right to the chase.

2:40 We sit behind three layers of glass and look inside a courtroom, but we hear it on a 40-second delay. There's a security officer to the judge's right who has a mute button and he is trained in classification information, both from the intelligence agency point of view and from the prison point of view.

3:04 And so if something is set in court, as happened the other day, and it involves something that they don't believe the public should hear, the mute button is thrown, and 40 seconds late 40 seconds later, um white noise comes into the public gallery. And we know that that 40-second delay uh masked in this instance, this recent instance, they were talking about over at the existing prison camp five, a room where the defense lawyers wanted to meet with the defendant.

3:39 And um, somebody felt there was just too much information about the blue room where the defendant takes English lessons, and then boom, the the feed was cut. And you know, I've been covering courts, I don't know for 30 more years, uh, more than 30 years, and I've never been in a court like this. I've never been in a in a behind glass, for example, and I've never been under such sort of control and scrutiny ground rules.

4:09 Um, you travel to Guantanamo on a Saturday to attend court, possibly on a Monday, and then if it's finished in a week, you return um back to the United States on a Saturday. So that is extraordinary. These trials are just getting started. We're talking about the first death penalty trial ever at Guantanamo Bay, involving uh the USS coal bombing, a man who's accused of being one of the central planners of that bombing off Yemen in the year 2000 of the USS coal, a destroyer ship with more than 200 sailors on.

4:46 Suicide bombers attacked the ship, and 17 sailors were killed. And the defendant was picked up two years later, and his trial is due to start uh with jury selection next month, uh 26 years after that attack, and 24 years into his detention. And part of the reason for that is because um rather than pick him up and take him to New York or any place where he could be charged, they took him to the CIA sites where he was uh questioned outside the rule of law for four years.

5:19 Um, and then he was brought to Guantanamo. And then these current trial formats were developed, um, and they've been in pretrial litigation. In terms of the arc of Guantanamo, this is the second courthouse. And like I said, this is the courthouse with the uh censorship switch, the audio uh kill switch.

5:40 It is uh a skip, a secure facility inside. They can talk about classified information. There's a um at the beginning, there was a much smaller courthouse for the low-value detainees, the material support for terror cases that were to be in an unconstitutional format. And that felt more like a court-martial or as or uh a murder trial or you know, criminal trial you'd attend in like Massachusetts, where I covered the Superior Court in New Bedford.

6:15 But the the other evolution is not only is this a new class of prisoners in this post-2006 court, but um almost every single with very except for a couple, every one of those prisoners who was brought before these men are gone. They were either tried, convicted, pleaded guilty in exchange for return, just a couple of them.

6:41 They were found to be no longer a threat or incorrectly held because they did not meet the definition of someone eligible for detention by the authorization for use of military force. And so in the arc of Guantanamo, on day one, they brought in 20 people. Today, the 20 prisoners. Today there are 15 prisoners, and across the years, 790 men and boys have been brought here, all of them by the Bush administration.

7:11 The Bush administration, it should be noted, removed, sent away, repatriated the first 540, and the Obama administration set hold many of the ones that were still there. And the Ark of Guantanamo, I would like to point out, is I am sitting here alone in a press room that's has the capacity for 15 writers.

7:35 And when first came, there was a uh a cap of 20 reporters, and they came 20 at a time. And there was a period when for the cases they say would bring down 60. Um, and I am frequently the only one here.

7:52 It's so invaluable, Carol, your your knowledge of these cases and the fact that you're there today. And I will just say, as someone who used to be a government attorney working on Guantanamo closure and working on a lot of other Guantanamo issues, your reporting and just securities analysis were the two places you had to look if you wanted to be informed and understand the legal issues.

8:12 So I want to express that note of appreciation that I'm sure many of our listeners feel. Um, and just to kind of unpack a little bit, there's so many follow-up questions I have for you about the big issues at stake in this uh coal bombing trial coming up, but to make sure folks understand why we have that 40-second delay and what that means for you as a reporter.

8:34 It is the treatment of those detainees by the US government. And then to some extent, their current conditions of confinement by the US government that is the reason that the button gets gets hit, right? It's it's not as though 25 years later there's going to be some new piece of intelligence about Coral Qaeda, which is decimated, right?

8:56 That that is at issue. Um so talk us through a little bit when when that button gets hit, you obviously don't know what's being said. Do you think uh do you think it is ever the case um that it does in fact come to light what was going on in those moments, or do you think it is truly um usually information about the detainees own treatment by the US government or conditions of confinement?

9:21 These are military judges or military officers, and they like all judges, they're very different personalities. So some of them, after the button has been turned off, will go on the record and explain. It was a mistake. Something was said that was wasn't classified. Sometimes they rewind time. I mean, the person with their finger on the button sometimes pushes it incorrectly.

9:43 Um, the use of the button has expanded to protect um stuff that goes on at the prison, which wasn't really much. This is a more recent issue. We learned a lot more about what was going on at the prison, but they put more secrecy around it. But there are several categories of things that we the people cannot know.

10:03 And we do know some of them already. And one of them is the countries where these men were held on their way to Guantanamo Bay, which is not declassified and still a secret held by the CIA, but widely known to include Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, and other European countries that have gone before the International Court of Human Rights and have been fined for having held uh CIA black sites.

10:30 But the US uh government still classifies those countries, which, if you guys remember, uh somewhat ironically, during an argument over at the Supreme Court, they mentioned Poland repeatedly. Those of us who sit down here, as we read that transcript, thought, too bad they didn't have the button, they would have silenced those justices over and over again.

10:55 But they also are protecting the names and identities of the people who worked in those sites. The sites may be closed, but um, they are still giving those people immunity with rare exception. And particularly protected, um, and I don't know that we'll ever know them, is the names of the medical personnel who took part in um not well, not necessarily doing these things called enhanced interrogation techniques, but uh monitoring the welfare of the detainees and trying to, in some instances, bring people back from the breakout.

11:33 Or one instance, bringing people um prisoner back from the brink of death, and participating in vital signs and checking on people who were subject to these techniques, and those are protected. Some of the interrogators are protected. The ones who were contractors hired by the CIA have been publicly outed, but the people who were CIA agents and employees have not.

11:56 So a lot of it is, I think, still surrounding the possible protection and identity of identities of personnel, locations, and then there are still, excuse me, aspects of what was done to these men that the public still cannot know. And you will recall that the Senate undertook a 7,000-page study on the Black Site program, um, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and about 500 pages, the introduction, have been released with redactions.

12:27 There's material that when they put this trial on, the military officers who serve as the jury and will have top secret clearances within a compartment will possibly be able to know, but the public won't know. And the defendant who underwent that likely can't hear it, even though he could either perhaps dispute what is being presented.

12:54 But if if it's classified, only the people with the clearances can participate in that aspect of the trial. And there have been arguments across the years that the defendant should be presumptibly in the compartment because he knows these things. But the defense lawyers have also argued that their memories and experiences are so damaged that they may not actually know some of the things that are said about what happened to them back in the day.

13:24 So that's the brings us to one of the things that you just wrote, one of your first dispatches for us about the sanity board that's been ordered for Al-Nashri, the defendant in the USS Cole case. And obviously, torture is the issue that looms over this trial in terms of whether the defendant is even competent to stand trial, which is what you were just writing about, that's at issue right now, that isn't a live issue in the case.

13:48 Uh, what kinds of evidence can be used against him at trial? Um, whether, again, there are um circumstances in which that evidence can be attenuated or kind of, you know, what that chain looks like from the mistreatment in US custody through to today. Um there's a whole host of other issues as well, though, that I think sometimes folks forget because this court system is in fact still so novel.

14:17 And you pointed out a lot of the earlier cases, you know, they were foot soldiers, they were plea deals, uh, a child soldier in one case, Omar Cotter among others, right? Balul, the propagandist who mentioned. Um, but there's not necessarily, there is in fact no precedent for this kind of trial. So the procedures being used, right, the substantive law being applied.

14:40 And one of the big issues that you mentioned, the USS Cole case, is about an event that took place prior to 9-11. So before the 2001 AUMF was enacted, obviously well before the Military Commissions Act. And that's going to be an issue that's disputed in this case as well, right? Is whether we can even have a trial under these, you know, under this act that is about pre-9-11 events, um, and whether there was even an armed conflict going on at the time, right?

15:10 These are all heavily disputed questions. So when you look ahead to kind of if we get a jury impaneled, and you've raised questions about how difficult that's going to be, you know, if we get to a point where we are actually in uh trial mode, what do you think are the big issues that are going to play out that you're keeping your eye on in your questions?

15:33 So the um pretrial proceedings that have been going on since 2011 have resolved at this level the question of whether they have jurisdiction. The judges have heard heard the arguments and concluded they have. It's pretty widely understood that it that will be teed up for any appeal, because the judges who are the military judges uh uh uh by nature accept the creation of this court and the prosecution's um premise that even though the court was created after 9-11 and the crimes uh they they argue that this war began in Afghanistan in 19 in the 1990s with the rise of Osama bin Laden and his pronouncements, fatwas against uh we the West, the United States.

16:27 I mean, one of the issues that I still don't understand, and I guess can probably explain it better, is if this is a war court and those were sailors and they were at war and sailors were attacked, even though they understood that they believed they were in a peace in peace side, but retroactively they say this was a war, where's the war crime?

16:50 And this is you know, this is the these are the kind of issues that these the jury may actually wonder about because they're military officers. And that one of the crimes that is alleged is called perfidy. I don't know, I didn't go to law school, but I you guys do you even teach perfidy? Um, it's just not a subject that uh comes up.

17:08 In addition, now Carol, but we didn't used to. I think you also teach habeas corpus now, and it was sort of not uh useful before 9-11, let's say. Um but but so the jury's gonna have have to be convinced that this was a war, that that there were hostilities. Um, the defense is going to raise the argument that this is with this man, whatever he did or didn't do, this this behavior happened prior to the 9-11 and prior to the creation of the court.

17:43 But the ex post facto thing has pretty much been resolved. And it is it is widely believed this will be one of the main sources of appeal after if there's a conviction. Um the the big issues that I see are that it happened so long ago and involved FBI agents going over to Yemen and being, in some ways, spoon-fed evidence by the local security forces.

18:12 We had pretrial testimony years ago about a Yemeni general taking an FBI agent by the hand in a house and leading him to a DNA sample and saying, here's your evidence. And virtually everybody who was questioned in Yemen is unavailable. The witnesses were interviewed by first name only, no second name, no address, no date of birth, no identity.

18:41 And so what we'll end up with is FBI agents who were uh at the scene describing interviews they did in another language in another country that were brought to them by security forces of the state of Yemen. Um, and we don't really know what the defense is going to do, but it sounds from years of pretrial as though they're going to say this guy's the fall man and that the government knows a lot more, and that he had much more.

19:07 Um there were people who were more involved in this attack. Um it's an odd court, it's an odd crime. What seems kind of logical about it is we're sitting on a Navy base. It's a military trial of a man who is accused of being involved in a fought on a on a on a Navy ship, but the law surrounding it is all, as you say, novel.

19:34 And um the defense is going to try to educate this jury to what they see as the problems of the case, and that and the prosecution is going to bring the closest thing they can to sort of a law and order kind of presentation of witnesses showing evidence, pieces of the coal, talking about things they saw.

19:56 One of the things we we've been hearing is that this novel court has no subpoena authority, with the exception of people in the U.S. military and people who are active employees of the government. And we've been learning that the that the prosecution has 130 witnesses, nearly none of them eligible for subpoena, and very few of them were going to come to Guantanamo Bay.

20:18 Wow. This is going to think back to COVID, in some ways, look like a Zoom court. People are going to be showing up at video sites or setting up Zoom casts in their living rooms and answering questions to a court that sits down here. Um and in that regard, this may be the first death penalty trial ever by Zoom.

20:42 Um a huge amount of it is going to be the evidence and the testimony is going to be remote with people watching a screen. Um, this but also will be the first capital trial ever at Guantanamo Bay in this court. There are only four or five other people who are charged with capital crimes, and this one goes first.

21:03 The other part about it is because it's so remote and because it's only being broadcast from the court to a few sites in the United States, it will feel very distant and it will be easily ignored. It will be very easily ignored. Uh, the public can go and watch it on a screen at Fort Meade, Maryland, if you can figure out how to get on that post.

21:24 The Cole families have a viewing site in Norfolk, Virginia. But there were over 200 sailors on that ship, and they're everywhere. Um, and then the legal community, um, if they have a pass to go to the Pentagon, there'll be a screening room in the Pentagon. But this is not a public trial in the sense that people could, you know, go for the day if they're interested, or you know, uh approach a defense lawyer or a prosecutor and ask them questions.

21:54 People are brought down in custody, they're managed in custody, they're segregated by groups and It's very much a military trial.

22:08 There's so many important insights that you provide, I have to say. And one other piece of it that I think about a little bit is um under international human rights law, there is um a an allowance for military trials to not abide by some of the baseline rules, but not if it's a capital case. It's kind of interesting.

22:32 So if it's a capital case, there's supposed to be no softening of the rules uh for fair trials. Um interesting how unorthodox this is, both for like military court-martial type trials or anything else that we can recognize. Um, I guess one other question I had is it's um the word looming was used before, I think it's about test the idea that you know part of the treatment of the mistreatment of the um individuals through enhanced interrogation is something that looms over these trials, including over the prosecution.

23:10 Like the prosecution is severely hampered, hampered by that legacy. Um so when I say looms, I mean in all sorts of ways. I wondered if there's something else that looms on the in the trials, which is this idea that on guantonomy you have two sets of detainees. One are subject to military trial, and others are not.

23:33 And the others that are not have been ones that are preventively detained under the theory of not returning to a battlefield. And I remember it was years a few years ago, there was a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in which the senators were hearing from Pentagon witnesses and the like, and they were some of them shocked to learn that if an individual is ever eventually tried, and let's say acquitted, and everything that you said, Carol, you know, raises the possibility that that might actually be the result, given that it's 26 years later and memories fade and um difficulties with subpoenas, etc.

24:10 If there's an acquittal, that individual could still just be Helm in Guantanamo or the mission of hostilities.

24:16 Yeah. The duration of hostilities. This is a this is a concept that was actually litigated in this case and in other cases. If my client is acquitted, does he go home? And the prosecution, but then led by a general army general, responded that that's not our lane, that there are other procedures that test probably knows best of all, that are in play about whether somebody is eligible for release or transfer.

24:44 And um a hundred percent, somebody who is acquitted, even in a capital case, um, or more possibly has their a conviction overturned through appeal, can be held for the duration of hostilities. You know, I I called these uh years ago, I coined the term forever prisoners. And the forever prisoners are not the people who are uh tried and convicted in serving a sentence, even life, those are not forever prisoners.

25:15 Forever prisoners are people who have been determined through administrative proceedings to be eligible to be held for the duration of hostilities in this forever war. Because if there's no one on the other side to surrender, if this is not a traditional war that ends in a traditional way, uh Congress maybe can you know bring it to an end, but it they can be held forever.

25:39 It's it's this war on Al-Qaeda, which has morphed into this war on against terrorism, and they are forever prisoners. And yes, people are repeatedly shocked to learn that not only do we offold people like that, but should someone be acquitted, they're not going on.

25:57 It's really shocking to see how the U.S. government's arguments and habeas proceedings have kind of changed to try to fit that legal theory that the war is ongoing. Because it used to be that there were booths on the ground in Afghanistan. And as folks know, when you know, the one time the Supreme Court kind of took a crack at this in Hamdi, then booths are on the ground in Afghanistan for that category of prisoners in that war, right?

26:23 That that's kind of the cabining that they did for the case that was in front of them. And obviously, booths are not on the ground in Afghanistan anymore, but also we have detainees who were not even part of that either core al-Qaeda or Dalban set. And the United States has started arguing in habeas cases that hostilities remain ongoing to the extent anything that they claim is covered by the 01 AUMF is ongoing, which in their view includes ISIS, which didn't exist on 9-11.

26:52 So, so long as there are hostilities ongoing against ISIS, right, we can continue to hold these forever prisoners at Guantanamo, which in my view totally doesn't work legally. But but that's that's now the claim. And so you can see kind of the pressure that this puts on the US government's view. And I think one of the and and strain that it it does to the legal theory and one of the things that you were pointing out, Carol, is this idea of when the war started and what can be a war crime, there's incredible strain on what most folks in the US government would have said would be the answers to those questions.

27:26 You have to kind of twist it and turn it upside down a little to get to yes for the coal case. Um, and so I think we're gonna see, right, in the Military Commission's context, how those arguments are being advanced, or when, if ever, the United States government says, you know, it's a bridge too far to make that argument in this case.

27:44 And so far they haven't said it's a bridge too far, right? So far, at every turn, they've been trying to find a way to make the legal theory work, right? So that this defendant can be prosecuted in this venue for that crime, right, rather than, you know, tried somewhere else where there is clearly jurisdictional work, clearly doesn't depend on there having been an armed conflict at the time of the attack.

28:06 They had cabin in this court for Al Qaeda and Al-Qaeda affiliates. So the good, the good news is for people who'd like to see it ending, it does not apply to ISIS. And they've not brought ISIS prisoners here, as you folks know better than I. They changed tactics and rather than capturing the ISIS prisoners, kill them in the battlefield or turn them over to um regional forces.

28:29 You know, Guantanamo is really uh stuck in a period of time that's the aftermath of 9-11, dealing with a court that was created in response to 9-11 and addressing crimes against people who were alleged to have captured them, excuse me, who who were captured in the aftermath of 9-11, but for crimes that were alleged to have happened in the years before and uh after the um 9-11 attacks.

28:58 It really is a long ago, it's a court for a long ago period. Um, there is no ISIS. And um I was thinking while you're talking, I'm not sure one I'd have to double check. One of the 15 people held here were captured in Afghanistan. Most are captured in Pakistan, some in Thailand. Um yes, the war was um taking the war began, I guess you could say, in Afghanistan, but it evolved into what they considered, you know, the global battlefield.

29:28 So they picked up people and brought them here from all sorts of places. The defendant in this case was captured in Dubai. Um, not that he'd never been to Afghanistan, but he was captured in Dubai and taken to Afghanistan and then Thailand for interrogation. A very unusual war, a very unusual court. And um I have come to believe that we really don't know how this court will be viewed until there are convictions and a higher court appeal.

30:00 Um, the judges are working off of a rule book and a manual that was created for these purposes. The other thing I just wanted to mention briefly is we were talking about the evidence and the idea that the prosecution is hampered. The prosecution have been losing their best evidence in these cases, which were uh a result of judges finding no attenuation when they subsequently confessed when they came to Guantanamo or spoke in interrogations with FBI and uh and CIS agents.

30:30 People were brought into rooms here in their fourth and fifth year of detention, never having seen a lawyer and not having been given a traditional Miranda right, and sat across a table and were asked questions that they'd been asked for four years by the CIA or three years by the CIA about their activities.

30:49 And they freely, in the minds of the agents, answered their questions. And the judges have found that they were there was no attenuation, and that they, these men were, in a sense, trained, programmed, conditioned to tell these agents who believed it was voluntary as they were having these conversations, to tell these agents what they were what they expected to hear.

31:14 Um, and these rulings have been throwing out these confessions, forcing the prosecution to do more of a document trail case and other kinds of cases against these people, which won't be as satisfying, perhaps, to the families, but will possibly land in convictions that will require higher court review.

31:38 And the fundamental question continuing about whether these cases and how much these cases were contaminated by the years when they had no rights. You know, most of these people, well, this man didn't, I don't believe this man saw a lawyer until after the original charge was won it. He's been in custody for years, this year.

32:01 And then in terms of the sanity board, his lawyers have he's had on his third or fourth seam of lawyers, they've been saying that he has been re-traumatized from waterboarding and some other kind of dark techniques used against him. Every time he travels to and from the courthouse, and and they're they're saying he's not confident in part because he was moved around the world by the CIA for years, and now every time he goes to the courthouse, he hasn't been treated for whatever experiences or traumas he had back then.

32:36 So um there's so many issues. Uh it can be really frustrating because we don't get to see them all. Um and then in terms of the censorship switch, it just feels un-American. It feels un-American to see people, you know, just gesticulating or becoming very emotional in court and waiting 40 seconds to find out what the problem is.

33:00 Um but they created this court, and by the way, we sent lawyers down here to uh litigate and try to prevent that 40-second delay and lost. So if it's a public trial, this is a very hampered public trial. And all of those issues, when the war began, what's legitimate evidence, whether you can try somebody, um, charge them after you've disappeared them from the rule of law for course, all of those issues have played out here, but will be reviewed, you know, not just by historians and scholars, but by the higher courts long after I stopped coming here.

33:42 And I think that's um that's such an important set of observations about the broader context of what is going on in this trial and and why it matters. And, you know, the details matter, the details of um, you know, what happens to a a defendant who, you know, doctors are saying was severely traumatized and is getting re-traumatized every day.

34:02 It's my understanding from your reporting, Carol, that um the defense made a motion to let the defendant stay at a facility next to the courthouse so he wouldn't have to do that drive back and forth, and that was rejected. Um, but you know, each of these issues is going to be potentially the issue that derails the entire trial, if if not now on appeal.

34:23 And so I guess that's our our one of our last questions for you now is do you think we will get to trial? Or will this latest, you know, request for a sanity board and and the the new opinions of the doctors who've most recently evaluated the defendant will it stop the trial in its tracks?

34:41 Hate to make a prediction. Um I suspect that um these defense lawyers are going to try to get a stay at a higher court, and we'll find out if the higher courts believe that uh some of these other pretrial issues shouldn't play out. If there is something in motion to bring the first 36 of what could be a hundred or so member pool down here uh for jury selection on October 19th, and people seem pretty determined to get it started.

35:12 I don't know if it gets started and it, you know, gets locked along the way, or if they don't do jury selection, but I feel like there may be a panel put together before the new year. We've learned that the panel will be assembled and then everybody's going home. And that um we learned this because there was a discussion of what the naval officers will wear, and they've been instructed to come for jury selection in one uniform, and there's an agreement that they're going to wear a different uniform.

35:43 This is the military uniforms count, and they aren't hacking them. And we learned that after the jury has been selected, everyone's going home for the holidays, and they'll come back with their correct uniforms, and this trial should start, could start in earnest after in the early next year. It's a court like no other.

36:02 People are going to be commuting back and forth, potentially to bases around the world, if that's where they come from. The jury's anonymous. We weren't probably not going to know where they come from, but they are drawn from bases around the world from all four five services.

36:17 They've added Space Force to the Um So just want to thank you for this discussion, which I think helps situate a lot of the writing that you'll be doing over this next coming uh period. And uh just uh express the deep gratitude um that we have for your work, and so many other people do, and um and for people who are tuning into these issues.

36:45 I think some people, for the first time, just in terms of how what year they grew up and what generation that they are, and uh how important your work has been to creating a record, both for history but also for the present day, how your readers that are among your most avid readers of the families of the victims, the military personnel who are running this system, uh tests and government, uh at the folks in DC working on the system.

37:13 And it's just the enormous um value that you've given in terms of both visibility, but the meticulousness and the insights and the comprehensiveness with which you treat these issues that's so factually driven. Um, it's uh really it's it's just on its own terms important. But I also think it's just such a great model, to be frank, for journalism and covering really difficult national security issues, but from all the perspectives so that uh everybody at least tries to get the comments and effects.

37:47 And you you provide that. And it's uh really uh our honor to be able to provide some of the platform for where some of your work will appear.

37:56 We've had this conversation. I think we agree. If they're going to put on a death penalty trial down here for the first time for someone who, again, was disappeared from the rule of law for four years, someone should cover it. And people, not everyone's going to be interested, but the people who are interested will be deeply interested in the details.

38:16 So hopefully we can bring that out.

38:18 Welcome.

38:19 Thank you.

38:20 We really appreciate it, Carol. We'll be in touch. Thank you. And readers can stay tuned for Carol's dispatches, which will be coming as the trial goes on. This episode was hosted by me, Tess Bridgeman, and my co-host Ryan Gutman. It was produced by Daniel Hojnecki and edited by Pooja Shaw. Special thanks to our guest, Carol Rosenberg.

38:42 Her Guantanamo dispatches are available on the Just Security website and will be linked in today's show note. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.