"It's desirable that they're abandoning the path of using reporters as witnesses," said Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice in Washington, D.C. "It's a very toxic strategy."
Whose bright idea was it on the prosectuor's team to try to make this a 1st Amendment issue??? Nothing like turning an open and shut case into a more serious controversey!
The prosecution wasn't going for a 1st Amendment issue. They were most likely going for charges on Art. 88, Contempt Towards Officials. What the prosecution wanted was to establish, through the testimony of journalists, that the quotes attributed to the offender were his statements word for word.
When they met resistance from the journalists they got Watada to admit those statements in exchange for dropping a couple charges. They still get to use the statements as aggravating circumstances during the punishment phase.