The former Guantanamo Bay chief prosecutor, Colonel Moe Davis, who was in charge when David Hicks was before the military commission on charges of providing material support for terrorism, has spoke out about the ongoing affairs at Guantanamo Bay. 1
Air Force Col. Moe Davis, who quit the war court last year, said political appointees and higher-ranking officers pushed prosecutors to file charges before trial rules were even written.
A supposedly impartial legal adviser demanded they pursue cases where the defendant "had blood on his hands" because those would excite the public more than mundane cases against document forgers and al Qaeda facilitators, Davis said.
He said the pressure ramped up after "high-value" prisoners with alleged ties to the September 11 plot were moved to Guantanamo from secret CIA custody shortly before the 2006 U.S. congressional elections and amid the ongoing U.S. presidential campaigns.
"There was that consistent theme that if we didn't get this thing rolling before the election it was going to implode," Davis testified in the courtroom at the remote Guantanamo naval base in Cuba.
"Once you got the victim families energized and the cases rolling, whoever won the White House would have difficulty stopping the proceeding."
Davis' strongest criticism was aimed at Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, the legal adviser who was supposed to provide impartial advice to the trials' overseer.
He said Hartmann had effectively joined the prosecution team and "took micromanagement to the nanomanagement level." Davis said Hartmann tried to dictate which lawyer would try cases and overrode Davis' ban on filing charges that relied on evidence obtained through the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding.
Davis testified that he "inherited" the Hicks case from a previous prosecutor and would not otherwise have charged him because he wanted to focus on cases serious enough to merit 20 years in prison and the Hicks case did not meet that test. 2
While it is not groundbreaking news and that most of what Colonel Moe Davis has said has been heard before, to my knowledge, it is the highest ranking official to date who has served time at Guantanamo Bay who is speaking out about what is going on at Guantanamo Bay. This gives credit to all those people in the past who have come out. From former detainees, to former military personnel of the US military at Guantanamo Bay.
What Colonel Moe Davis has said also shows that when the former Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, publicly declared that the military commissions were fair, to be an absolute load of crap 3.
Again, I must reiterate that no one is saying that David Hicks is innocent. Human rights organisations, such as Amnesty International, have only been arguing for a fair trial which no one at Guantanamo Bay has and will receive while military commissions and torture are still in place at Guantanamo Bay. If the US was serious about protecting human rights, the court cases would have been heard in the US court system where the independence of the judiciary should be paramount and the US constitution gives the detainees basic rights which are non existent at Guantanamo Bay.
- Beju -
