At every chance the US has to climb out of the hole it has dug for itself at Guantanamo, it burrows in further. The latest is its decision to bar the news media from tribunals for 14 “high-value” Guantanamo prisoners.

The edited transcript of the tribunal for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged third-in-command in al-Qaeda, which the Pentagon said was held on Saturday, has provoked shock for the extent of his apparent claims: he says he had a role in the attacks of September 11, 2001 and nearly three dozen others. But it has also fostered unease about whether they might have been obtained by torture.

The statement appears to support the US’s assertion that at least some of the 400-plus men it is holding at Guantanamo are highly dangerous terrorists. But these tribunals, and the new secrecy, still leave the US open to the charge that it offends its own principles of justice in its pursuit of the “War on Terror”.

The “Combatant Status Review Tribunals” have always been controversial. They are preliminary hearings intended to determine whether Guantanamo prisoners are “enemy combatants”, and so, the US asserts, can then be tried in a special military commission or held indefinitely without charge.

The US devised the CSRTs in response to criticism that it was breaking the Geneva Conventions requiring a prisoner’s status to be established by a competent tribunal. But critics, led by the prisoners’ defence lawyers, say that the tribunals are not a fair way of distinguishing innocent bystanders from enemy fighters, and do not give prisoners a fair chance to challenge their detention.

The prisoner, facing a panel of three military officers, does not have a lawyer, they point out, but only a government-appointed representative. He may not hear evidence against him if it is classified. Only rarely may he call witnesses (Mohammed’s request for two was turned down).

Colonel Dwight Sullivan, head of the Pentagon team of military defence lawyers for the prisoners, has said the tribunals fail to give the prisoners an adequate means of challenging evidence against them.

All of the 550-odd previous CSRTs have been open to the media, although some material has been restricted. The Department of Defence said that the hearings for these 14 needed to be private for security reasons. But critics say that it is because the 14 men have been tortured. Scott Horton, chair of the international law commitee of the New York City Bar Association, said that the Pentagon was concerned that “these 14 will say what was done to them. They were tortured and mistreated, and that fact is classified secret.” The Associated Press, in challenging the decision on secrecy, acknowledged that security might demand that parts were closed, but that complete closure violated constitutional rights and the Department’s own principles.

The edited transcript of the Mohammed CSRT does nothing to dispatch these concerns. In it, Mohammed said that he did make some statements as a result of mistreatment by “CIA peoples” after he was captured in 2003. To clarify, the Navy Captain heading the panel asked him: “Is any statement that you made, was it because of this treatment, to use your word, you claim torture. Do you make any statements because of that?” The answer is unclear, as it falls within portions that the Pentagon has deleted. However, just before his long account of his terrorist activities, Mohammed also told the tribunal members that he was not, at that moment, speaking under duress.

The US had a chance in these hearings, of prisoners it claims are among the worst terrorists it has captured, to begin to answer some of the criticisms about Guantanamo and the military commissions. Instead, through the imposition of secrecy, for which it has given barely even cursory justification, it has given a distrustful world more reason to think that it has something to hide.

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