The US military wanted the witness identified only as “Interrogator No. 1” and forbade reporting his name during coverage of this week’s Guantanamo hearings for a 23-year-old Canadian prisoner who is charged with killing a US soldier in Afghanistan.

“Your reporters published the name of a witness whose identity was protected in court,” Pentagon spokesman Col. Dave Lapan wrote in an e-mail sent to the news organizations Friday.

Consequently, he said, the individual reporters have been banned from attending future proceedings, but the news organizations themselves will be allowed to send other journalists.

Carol Rosenberg of The Miami Herald, Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star, Paul Koring of The Globe and Mail, and Steven Edwards of Canwest News Service included the interrogator’s name in their coverage of this week’s hearings for Omar Khadr at the isolated US base in Cuba.

Editors indicated they intend to appeal the Pentagon’s decision.

“We have been covering Guantanamo for years and we’ve always played by (the) rules — and we did in this case as well. We expect to sort this out and continue to cover this important story, as we have always done,” Mindy Marques, The Miami Herald’s managing editor, wrote in an e-mail responding to an Associated Press request for comment.

Toronto Star editor, Michael Cooke, flatly dismissed the ban as “absurd.”

“This is ridiculous and an unfair ban and the Toronto Star will object strongly to it,” Cooke told the AP.

Canwest Vice President Scott Anderson said “it’s critical that we find out what happened here,” while Globe foreign editor, Stephen Northfield, said the newspaper would appeal the decision.

Jameel Jaffer, the American Civil Liberties Union’s deputy legal director, urged the Pentagon to reconsider its decision to ban the reporters from future tribunals, noting that the name of the interrogator had been published in previous reports.