It’s a great honor to get a New York Press Club Award for my coverage of the Sept. 11 case at Guantanamo Bay. The New York Press Club announced the full list of winners on May 15, which happens to be my birthday – nice! I won in the category of “Crime Reporting,” which includes hard news coverage of crime, cops and courts. We submitted a half-dozen stories from 2018, much of it focusing on the discovery disputes between the five defense teams and the government over evidence from abusive CIA interrogations.
As for 2019, some interesting developments. In the late March pretrial session, we learned that the government has recordings of the five defendants allegedly discussing the 9/11 plot in the months before the attacks. More recently, the new judge, Marine Col. Keith Parrella, wants defense teams to file suppression motions – even though he is scheduled to leave the case next month.
Finally, we started a new series called “Unsung Heroes of the Military Commissions” in which we have profiled a defense paralegal and a prosecution paralegal.