Former Gitmo Prosecutor to Testify for Detainee

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Former Prosecutor to Testify for Detainee
Susan Etheridge for The New York Times

Col. Morris D. Davis, once chief prosecutor at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and still with the Air Force, is now a chief critic.

By WILLIAM GLABERSON
Published: February 28, 2008


Until four months ago, Col. Morris D. Davis was the chief prosecutor at Guantánamo Bay and the most colorful champion of the Bush administration’s military commission system. He once said sympathy for detainees was nauseating and compared putting them on trial to dragging “Dracula out into the sunlight.”

Then in October he had a dispute with his boss, a general. Ever since, he has been one of those critics who will not go away: a former top insider, with broad shoulders and a well-pressed uniform, willing to turn on the system he helped run.

Still in the military, he has irritated the administration, saying in articles and interviews that Pentagon officials interfered with prosecutors, exerted political pressure and approved the use of evidence obtained by torture.

Now, Colonel Davis has taken his most provocative step, completing his transformation from Guantánamo’s chief prosecutor to its new chief critic. He has agreed to testify at Guantánamo on behalf of one of the detainees, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden.

Colonel Davis, a career military lawyer nearing retirement at 49, said that he would never argue that Mr. Hamdan was innocent, but that he was ready to try to put the commission system itself on trial by questioning its fairness. He said that there “is a potential for rigged outcomes” and that he had “significant doubts about whether it will deliver full, fair and open hearings.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28gitmo.html?_r=3&ei=5088&en=7517e5b779940668&ex=1361941200&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1204207504-+JO/RJTDnvE9wO9EyWMr5A