She won’t be going back to Guantanamo on Sunday for the end of Omar Khadr’s pre-trial hearing, Danger Room Has Learned. And that just really sucks. Michelle knows more about Khadr than any other journalist. I really only barely know her, but I feel confident in saying she’s also an extraordinary person and everything you want to see in a colleague: brilliant, diligent, thorough, humane, able to rapidly catalogue and synthesize disparate pieces of information into a clear picture while simultaneously seeing the questions that still need to be answered. (At risk of a digression, that’s a big cognitive challenge/accomplishment. Most of us read the world as a text and perceive it as a seamless whole, papering over the discrepancies instead of reading them as necessary, because the world is an incomplete story.)

I hope she’s back for when Khadr’s military commission begins in August.

Update, 8:35 p.m.: GREAT NEWS. DOD just informed Michelle that she’s reinstated to return to GTMO on Sunday. It’s a Friday miracle!

(Photo of me at Guantanamo Bay by Michelle Shephard. Yes, that’s the press corps snorkeling. Some of us were drunk. It was several hours before noon.)