Transparency watch

The Government Accountability Office has issued this report on steps that could be taken to expand public access to and information about the Guantanamo military commission trials. Bottom line:

The Secretary of Defense should ensure that the Deputy Secretary of Defense assesses the tradeoffs of potential options for expanding public access to military commissions’ proceedings by identifying and analyzing associated risks, and, as appropriate, developing a strategy to implement any viable options. 

We provided a draft of this report to the DOD, Department of Justice, and relevant intelligence agencies for review and comment. In written comments provided by DOD (reproduced in appendix IV), DOD concurred with our recommendation, noting planned actions to address it. DOD and certain intelligence agencies also provided technical comments, which we incorporated in the report as appropriate.

Query: are there similar issues of access to and information surrounding the far more numerous courts-martial of U.S. military personnel? The Military Justice Act of 2016 included a new Art. 940a, UCMJ, that looks, among other things, to ways to improve access to court-martial case information.