Real Politiks

In my first realpolitiks column, found here, I asked a simple question: Why isn’t anyone in the Guantanamo Bay / Water boarding-torture system standing up and saying this is wrong? Well, my question is answered, and the name of the righteous dissenter is Colonel Morris Davis, depicted above as the Archangel Michael slaying the demonic White House.

Until last October, Colonel Davis was the lead prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay. It was his job to organize, and prosecute the US Governments legal case against the “enemy combatants” that are being indefinitely detained on the Quasi-American territory. In October he resigned his position after the Bush Administration appointed William Haynes to be Pentagon general counsel, a position that oversees the defense, prosecution, and judge of the Guantanamo trial process.

William Haynes, it should be noted, is one of the key figures involved in the creation of legal arguments for ways to avoid the Geneva Convention. A former legal advisor to Donald Rumsfeld, he is essentially one of the architects of the whole “Detainee” and “Enhanced Interrogation” euphemism parade.

Colonel Davis explained in his December 10, 2007, L.A. Times op-ed. “I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system… I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively.”

Deeply politicized in what way you might ask? Well it seems that Haynes was placed by The Administration to essentially continue with a common Bush practice of putting politics before the law. In an article written by Geoff Elliott for The Australian, Colonel Davis speaking about the Australian Detainee David Hicks:

“At the time, you had John Howard [Prime Minister of Australia] in the press, making it clear to Americans that Hicks had to be charged by February,” Colonel Davis says.

“I was getting leaned on. We were getting pushed to get charges out before all the process was in place.”

Nor did it escape Colonel Davis’s attention that Mr. Cheney was due to visit Australia towards the end of last February.

It was clear the Hicks case was a top-agenda item with the then prime minister. In the end, Mr. Cheney would travel to Australia armed with good news.

The good news that David Hicks was going to be rammed through, made to plead guilty and then rubber stamped to go back to Australia without regards to his real guilt or innocence. David Hicks received a sentence of nine months for his “crimes” and we will probably never know if he deserved more, or less.

The whole system is a complete travesty. A political machine designed to make The Bush Administration, and their political allies abroad, look good. Furthermore, Colonel David alleges that the whole trial system is rigged. In a conversation that he recounted for The Nation:

When asked if he thought the men at Guantanamo could receive a fair trial, Davis provided the following account of an August 2005 meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes — the man who now oversees the tribunal process for the Defense Department. “[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time,” recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.’”

Davis submitted his resignation on October 4, 2007, just hours after he was informed that Haynes had been put above him in the commissions’ chain of command.

Last Friday Colonel Davis announced through The Washington Post that he would be acting as a witness for the defense in the trial of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the driver of Osama bin-Ladin. It is still uncertain of the Pentagon will allow him to testify in that case, but at least the man has the principle to try to speak out against a system he believes to be corrupted.

Colonel Davis has taken honorable rank amongst the many service men that have stood against the government when they see that it has done wrong. From those who marched for veterans benefits after world war one, to those who spoke out against the war in Vietnam. Let’s hope that Colonel Davis will not loose heart when they come to silence him.