Col. Morris Davis Discusses Guantánamo, Torture and Intelligence in the Wake of the Latest WikiLeaks Revelations
In the long years of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” — perpetuated, lamentably, by President Obama — in which soldiers are terrorists, and terrorists are “warriors,” and both of these parties are “enemy combatants” or “alien unprivileged enemy belligerents,” those called upon to play a part in this dangerous aberration from international norms have frequently rebelled, placing their allegiance to the Constitution above the President’s whims, for example, in the cases of the many military defense attorneys who fought against the government, as well as defending their clients, in the Military Commission trial system that was ghoulishly resuscitated by Dick Cheney in November 2001.
Prosecutors, too, have resigned rather than take part in an unfair process, including, most famously, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, who resigned rather than prosecuting torture victim Mohamedou Ould Slahi, and Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, who denounced the system’s inability to deliver justice in September 2008, leading, in part, to the release of former child prisoner Mohamed Jawad.
Also of note is Col. Morris Davis, the chief prosecutor of the Military Commissions from September 2005 to October 2007, when, having been a stauch advocate of the Commissions, he resigned because he had been put in a chain of command under the Pentagon’s senior lawyer Wiliam J. Haynes II, who believed in using information derived from torture in the Commisisons, thereby crossing a line that Davis was not prepared to cross. Read the rest of this entry »
Who's still at Guantánamo?
