Legal News

Col. Davis Says He Rebuffed ?Guy Who Said Waterboarding is A-OK?

By Dan Slater

“Suddenly, everybody had strong opinions about how we ought to do our job,” testified Air Force Col. Morris Davis yesterday. “If you can get the 9/11 guys charged, you get the victims’ families energized, and if the case is rolling, whoever took the White House would have difficulty stopping this process.”

Davis, the military-commissions-advocate-turned-critic, was testifying at Gitmo yesterday in the lacase of Osama bin Laden’s former driver, Salim Hamdan. Davis — who as Gitmo’s chief prosecutor initially filed charges against Hamdan, and has conceded that he “never had any doubts about Mr. Hamdan’s guilt” — was nevertheless put on the stand by the defense to testify that he faced growing interference from Pentagon superiors, who allegedly pressured him in deciding which cases to prosecute and whether to use evidence obtained from aggressive interrogation methods, such as waterboarding. Here are stories from the AP, the NYT and the WaPo. Click here and here for past LB coverage.

Davis said Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, a senior Pentagon official who oversaw the military commissions, directed him last year to push war crimes cases quickly. According to the Times, Davis testified that the general was trying to give the system legitimacy before a new president took office. He testified that General Hartmann said, “If we don’t get some cases going before the election, this thing’s going to implode.”

Davis said he quit after he was put in a chain of command beneath Defense Department GC William Haynes, who allegedly encouraged the use of evidence obtained through waterboarding. “The guy who said waterboarding is A-OK I was not going to take orders from. I quit,” Davis said.

In the morning, during Davis’s testimony, Hamdan, who’d been listening to a Yemeni translation of the proceedings, reportedly asked for permission to address the judge. His lawyers have said that he is suffering depression from years in solitary confinement. “My question is,” Hamdan said, “the animal has rights or not? But the human being doesn’t have rights?”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 29, 2008 (boomark / email).