It’s simply not fair to require that journalists not tell stories that are already out there in the public sphere. That turns them, once and for all, into stenographers. That’s not what our country needs from presidential press coverage.

So the guy running the Kangaroo Court for this child soldier has decided that rape threats do not constitute a threat of severe pain or suffering.

Mind you, as I alluded to here and made explicit by Parrish’s ruling, Gitmo rules say specifically you can use information so long as the information itself was not collected using torture. Which is why Parrish is so careful to argue that Khadr’s confessions have nothing to do with that threat of severe pain or suffering that Parrish seems to think is no big deal, because then everything’s admissible!

Justice has been discarded in favor of political expediency at Guantanamo, as Judge Patrick Parrish has allowed Omar Khadr’s confessions to be admitted into evidence in his military commission trial. Included among the confessions is one obtained by convicted torturer Joshua Claus under threat of rape and/or death for the then 15 year old suspect.

You’ll recall that DOD banned Carol Rosenberg and three other key Gitmo journalists when they published Claus’ name–even though one of them, Michelle Shepherd, had published an on-the-record interview with him in the past. Yet now DOD says–on the eve of the Khadr trial–that it’s okay to publish his name? And as justification, they say his own actions, rather than the public nature of his name, means publishing it does not violate ground rules? Really?

There are two pieces of good news in McClatchy’s story reporting that Carol Rosenberg, one of four journalists banned from Gitmo because she published the previously reported name of Omar Khadr’s first interrogator, Joshua Claus, will be allowed to return next week rather than after August 5, as they had previously decided.

A coalition of press outlets have written DOD General Counsel Jeh Johnson, calling that the banning of four Gitmo reporters for publishing the name of Omar Khadr interrogator Joshua Claus an unconstitutional example of prior restraint.

Both Steven Edwards and Michelle Shepherd (who are both among the journalists banned on Thursday) previously reported that Claus conducted most of Khadr’s interrogations at Bagram. Both raised the question whether Khadr was subjected to the same kind of abuse Claus used on other detainees, most of all Dilawar, who died after abuse in US custody. But in his on-the-record interview with Shepherd, Claus insisted that Khadr wasn’t subject to any of that same kind of abuse.

On Thursday, the Pentagon banned four reporters from further on-site reporting of military commission trials at Gauntanamo, because they published the previously known name of a witness that the Pentagon was trying to present as anonymous. The impact of this assault on press freedom can be seen immediately in the corporate news coverage of this event, as only McClatchy continues to name the witness in its coverage of the banning.

Almost every day, a new revelation surfaces regarding the United States’ role in spreading and perpetuating the crime of torture. This article looks at several such news stories from just the past few weeks.