This time, it’s the chief prosecutor for the Guantanamo Bay “war crimes” trials who has asked to be “reassigned” apparently over disagreements with the manner in which those “trials” were to be conducted:
WASHINGTON – The U.S. military’s chief prosecutor for the Guantanamo war crimes trials has resigned, the Pentagon said on Friday.
Air Force Col. Moe Davis asked to be moved to another post after the Pentagon rejected his complaint that another official should not be supervising his work, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said.
“Clearly, there was a disagreement with respect to roles and authorities that has now been cleared up,” Whitman said. “Colonel Moe Davis asked to be reassigned from his duties as the chief prosecutor.” […]
The Bush administration’s efforts to put the terrorism suspects at its military prison at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba through some form of judicial process has been fraught with problems.
The trials stalled … in June when military judges dismissed charges against the only two prisoners who had then been charged.
A U.S. military court last month reinstated the charges, clearing the way for the tribunals to resume.
Davis had complained to the Defense Department that Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, the legal adviser to the Convening Authority — a body responsible for running the trials — should not be supervising his work, Whitman said.
A team of military legal experts ordered by the Pentagon to look into the complaint found that Hartmann did have the authority to supervise the chief prosecutor’s work.
Davis asked to leave his post after receiving the team’s findings on Thursday, Whitman said.
So, the fix was in, again. Back in July, the military tribunal for which Col. Davis was the chief prosecutor dismissed war crimes charges against two of the Gitmo defendants, on the basis that the military had not even followed its own procedures for trying them:
The decisions did not turn on the guilt or innocence of the detainees, but rather made essentially the same determination that the military had not followed procedures to declare the detainees “unlawful enemy combatants,” which is required for the military commission to hear the cases. […]
The military judges said Congress authorized the bringing of war-crimes charges against detainees who had been declared by military tribunals to be “unlawful enemy combatants.” But they said the tribunals held at Guantánamo, known as combatant status review tribunals, or C.S.R.T.’s, had determined only that the detainees were enemy combatants, without making the added determination that their participation was “unlawful.”
Not surprisingly, a more senior military court reversed the Gitmo trial judges’ decision and reinstated the charges. Col. Davis then complains about his superior interfering in his work, and voila, a “team of military legal experts” is rounded up to justify General Hartmann’s right to interfere in the prosecutions of Gitmo detainees.
We’ve seen this before, if you recall. It seems any military lawyers who object to the “Kangaroo Court” aspects of the military hearings at Guantanamo end up resigning their positions or being “reassigned” to other duties. Remember these military defense attorneys, and their fate back in 2003?
(cont.)
A team of military lawyers recruited to defend alleged terrorists held by the US at Guantanamo Bay was dismissed by the Pentagon after some of its members rebelled against the unfair way the trials have been designed, the Guardian has learned.
And some members of the new legal defence team remain deeply unhappy with the trials – known as “military commissions” – believing them to be slanted towards the prosecution and an affront to modern US military justice. […]<p.
"The first day, when they were being briefed on the dos and don'ts, at least a couple said: 'You can't impose these restrictions on us because we can't properly represent our clients.'
“When the group decided they weren’t going to go along, they were relieved. They reported in the morning and got fired that afternoon.”
And then it happened again in 2004 to three more military attorneys:
The Pentagon official overseeing the war crimes trials in Guantánamo on Thursday dismissed three officers on the military tribunal that is conducting the proceedings, saying they could not judge the cases impartially.
The action appeared to create new turmoil for the first United States military tribunals since World War II. At the initial round of hearings in August, defense lawyers said most of the military officers who made up the five-member tribunal along with an alternate were unsuitable because they had served in Afghanistan or had other factors that made them biased.
“Although it may seem like a partial victory for us, it really puts all of us in a worse position,” said Joshua Dratel, a lawyer from New York who is defending David Hicks, 29, an Australian charged with being a soldier for the Taliban. Mr. Dratel said the decisions on Thursday seemed contrived or calculated to retain an advantage for the prosecution.
And what about Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, who defended the man alleged to be Osama bin Laden’s driver and won the case, only to see his military career go in the crapper, essentially forcing him out of the US Navy?
NEWARK, N.J. — The Navy lawyer who took the Guantánamo case of Osama bin Laden’s driver to the U.S. Supreme Court — and won — has been passed over for promotion by the Pentagon and must soon leave the military.
Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, 44, said last week he received word he had been denied a promotion to full-blown commander this summer, “about two weeks after” the Supreme Court sided against the White House and with his client, a Yemeni captive at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba.
Under the military’s “up-or-out” promotion system, Swift will retire in March or April, closing a 20-year career of military service.
The same Lt. Commander Swift, by the way who testified to Congress last year (regarding the Military Commissions Act which subsequently eliminated the right of habeas corpus when it was voted into law), about the attempts made by prosecutors to corrupt the hearings on detainees at Gitmo:
On June 15, 2005, I first testified before this Committee regarding my decision to file a next friend habeas petition on behalf of Mr. Hamdan. I told the Committee that when the Chief Prosecutor for commissions requested assignment of counsel to Mr. Hamdan, he specified that access to Mr. Hamdan was contingent upon negotiating a guilty plea on Mr. Hamdan’s behalf. I told this Committee then and I continue to believe today that the only way I could ethically represent Mr. Hamdan under those conditions was to present Hamdan with a second option of filing a habeas petition instead of pleading guilty.
It’s a familiar pattern by now. Question the way the Bush administration wants these phony show trials for the Gitmo detainees to be stage managed and you’re ass is kicked to the curb. Swallow your pride, your honor and any sense of justice or morality you possess and you can continue your legal military career. But at what cost?
We are becoming the opposite of the Land of the Free. America no longer stands for truth and justice, it stands for torture and indefinite detentions. We no longer have the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, we are obligated to submit to the federal government keeping it’s all seeing electronic eye on us night and day. We can be denied the right to travel, if we end up on the government’s mysterious “no fly” list. We can no longer peaceably assemble and dissent without being subject to mass arrests so that the President and his faction can party it up in New York City.
We, as a country, are living a lie. We are not a free country, and we are not the land of the brave. And that is the joint legacy of George Bush and all those who cowered before him after 9/11. And the few individuals who have risked their lives, or their careers and their reputations, by insisting on doing what is right rather than what the Bush administration demanded, are the exceptions that prove the rule.
For we can’t blame Bush alone for what has happened to our country. There were and continue to be active collaborators in both parties (Steny Hoyer, anyone?) who have gone along to get along, or “saved their powder” for a bigger fight, or who chose to believe the lies Bush told (over and over again) because it was politically expedient, or they didn’t want to lose their access as journalists, or because they were simply afraid of being labeled “unpatriotic” or tarred with the “traitor” brush if they stood up against the unconstitutional excesses of Bush’s gang of incompetent thugs.
That’s how it happens. It takes a nation to destroy its highest ideals, its most cherished values, its pretense of freedom and justice for all. One man couldn’t do it alone. he had help.
And so it goes.
