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Chief Guantanamo Prosecutor Resigned When Placed Under Command Of Torture Advocate Think
Progress Until Oct. 4, Morris Davis served as chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay. When originally asked why he was stepping down, Davis said that the Pentagon had ordered him “not to communicate with the news media about my resignation or military commissions.” Today in an LA Times op-ed, however, Morris reveals that part of the reason he resigned was that the Bush administration placed him under the chain of command of Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes, a torture advocate whose nomination to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals was blocked by the Senate. Morris writes:
Haynes is a close ally of Vice President Cheney and has been described as a “prime mover” in the effort to contravene the dictates of the Geneva Conventions. A 2003 working group appointed and supervised by Haynes argued the Geneva Conventions “must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to [Bush’s] Commander-in-Chief authority.”
More recently, Haynes blocked Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, a former Guantanamo Bay prosecutor, from testifying before Congress about his experiences with “enhanced” interrogation. In October, Morris also revealed that the Pentagon had been pushing for “high-profile” convictions of detainees ahead of the 2008 elections. Morris said “that he felt pressure to pursue cases that were deemed ’sexy’ over those that prosecutors believed were the most solid or were ready to go.”
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