Lawfare News

Possible Tweaks to Military Commissions Coverage: Feedback Requested

Wells Bennett
Tuesday, October 29, 2013, 6:00 PM
We at Lawfare aim to please---that is, to provide useful stuff for folks who work on, report on, study, or simply care about tough issues at the intersection of national security and law.  That mission has made for all kinds of projects, one being the blog’s sustained effort to post, regularly and in almost real time, coverage of military commissions proceedings at Guantanamo. That means sending a Lucky Someone (or two) out to Fort Meade to take in pretrial sessions, via Closed Circuit Television---with each session occupying about a week.  Back-to-back hearings in the two most activ

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We at Lawfare aim to please---that is, to provide useful stuff for folks who work on, report on, study, or simply care about tough issues at the intersection of national security and law.  That mission has made for all kinds of projects, one being the blog’s sustained effort to post, regularly and in almost real time, coverage of military commissions proceedings at Guantanamo. That means sending a Lucky Someone (or two) out to Fort Meade to take in pretrial sessions, via Closed Circuit Television---with each session occupying about a week.  Back-to-back hearings in the two most active commissions (the 9/11 case, and Al-Nashiri ) thus can suck up a great deal of time and resources from an operation that is, shall we say, leanly staffed.  Your humble editors wonder whether Lawfare might deliver the same or a higher quality level, albeit in a different and less labor-intensive format. Having that in mind, we are contemplating a modest adjustment to our commissions coverage and are interested in reader feedback on the idea. The change would look roughly like this: our people will continue to observe, live, especially-consequential, legally-interesting or especially-controversial argument sessions. But for all others, we would replace a live-blog format with a detailed daily digest, posted the following day, of the prior one's happenings. (Typically, transcripts of proceedings at ELC Courtroom Two are generated and publicly released by the close of business on the same day, or the next day.) This would take the form, instead of multiple posts over the course of the day, of a single, lengthy post describing in some detail what went down. Accordingly, our still-hypothetical tweak is now open for informal notice and comment. And to facilitate it, we have set up this handy-dandy little survey below, too.  If you have an opinion—positive or negative—about the proposed change, please do let us know.  

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Wells C. Bennett was Managing Editor of Lawfare and a Fellow in National Security Law at the Brookings Institution. Before coming to Brookings, he was an Associate at Arnold & Porter LLP.

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