From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's on the media.

Bob Garfield is away this week.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Last Friday, a federal appeals court ordered the government to give courts and defense attorneys much greater access to information on Guantanamo detainees challenging their imprisonment.

Also recently, the Supreme Court reversed itself and agreed to consider the legality of the military tribunals that try them.

Journalist Sami al-Haj is one of those detainees,

arrested at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in December 2001. He intended to cross into Afghanistan

to cover the U.S. military operation there. Instead, he spent six months in detention and then was

packed off to Guantanamo where he is today.

Al Hodge is the only journalist imprisoned at Guantanamo. He was crossing into Afghanistan

to cover U.S. military operations there for Al Jazeera. In fact, his lawyer claims that's the main

reason he's still in Gitmo, a U.S. government grudge against the Middle

East's leading news channel. Rachel Morris is an editor at the Washington Monthly. She spent

the past seven months covering Al Hodge's case for the Columbia Journalism Review. She said that

since he was detained, he has been charged with an ever-changing series of misdeeds.

When he initially got there, there was some allegations about attempting to purchase

Stinger missiles in Chechnya. More recently, there have been things about him carrying

money, which made its way to charities that supported terrorists in some way.

There's also things about him having once met an al-Qaeda lieutenant, but with no explanation

of what the meeting involved. Those are the sort of more serious ones in the summary of evidence

against him. And there's also a long list of vaguely suspicious

sounding things that he said to have done without a lot of context about what they might mean.

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