Legal News

Another U.S. Prosecutor Turns on Gitmo?s War Crimes Tribunals

By Dan Slater

I am beginning to have grave misgivings about what I am doing, and what we are doing as a country. . . I no longer want to participate in the system, but I lack the courage to quit. I am married, with children, and not only will they suffer, I’ll lose a lot of friends. — Darrel J. Vandeveld, prosecutor in Guantanamo Bay war crimes tribunals, in an e-mail to a priest

In April, Salim Hamdan — Osama bin Laden’s former driver — gained a star witness when Gitmo’s former chief prosecutor, Col. Morris Davis, took the stand on Hamdan’s behalf. Those who’ve yet to stand trial in Gitmo’s war crimes tribunals could be getting another star witness in Darrel J. Vandeveld.

“How do I get myself out of this office?” Vandeveld, a former prosecutor at Gitmo, asked Major David J.R. Frakt of the Air Force Reserve, in August. It was a strange question to be asking Frakt, who represented the Afghan whom Vandeveld was prosecuting for an attack on U.S. soldiers. Last month, Vandeveld resigned from that case, the military commissions overall and, ultimately, active military duty. Here’s the L.A. Times story.

In a declaration and subsequent testimony, Vandeveld, 48, said the U.S. government was not providing defense lawyers with the evidence it had against their clients, including exculpatory information. According to the LAT, he wrote that the system in place at the U.S. military facility in Cuba was so dysfunctional that it deprived “the accused of basic due process and subject[ed] the well-intentioned prosecutor to claims of ethical misconduct.”

Army Col. Lawrence J. Morris, the chief prosecutor and Vandeveld’s boss, said the Office of Military Commissions provides “every scrap of paper and information” to the defense. Morris said that Vandeveld was disgruntled because his commanding officers disagreed with some of his legal tactics and that he “never once” raised substantive concerns. He told the LAT that he had no idea why Vandeveld had become so antagonistic toward the tribunal process, adding that the lieutenant colonel’s outspokenness angered him because it was unfair and was a “broad blast at some very ethical and hardworking people whose performances are being smudged groundlessly.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on October 13, 2008 (boomark / email).