Dispatches from the Culture Wars

Another JAG attorney acting as prosecutor in the case of a detainee at Guantanamo Bay has resigned in protest of the unfairness of the military tribunals there. Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld quit in protest and filed an affidavit in the case of a detainee he was prosecuting explaining that he resigned because defense lawyers were refused access to evidence that suggests their client's innocence. You can read his affidavit here. I'll quote parts of that affidavit below the fold:

7. My ethical qualms about continuing to serve as a prosecutor relate primarily to the procedures for affording defense counsel discovery. I am highly concerned, to the point that I believe I can no longer serve as a prosecutor at the Commissions, about the slipshod, uncertain "procedure" for affording defense counsel discovery. One would have thought that after six years since the Commissions had their fitful start, that a functioning law office would have been set up and procedures and policies not only put into effect, but refined.

8. Instead, what I found, and what I still find, is that discovery in even the simplest of cases is incomplete or unreliable. To take the Jawad case as only one example - a case where no intelligence agency had any significant involvement -- I discovered just yesterday that something as basic as agents' interrogation notes had been entered into a database, to which I do not have personal access, on or about 11 August 2008. These and other examples too legion to list, are not only appalling, they deprive the accused of basic due process and subject the well-intentioned prosecutor to claims of ethical misconduct...

12. I have previously declined to share the foregoing information with the defense because I believe I have some justifiable concern of retaliation if I am seen as being too cooperative with the defense and because I had hoped to change and improve things from within OMC-P. Other officers who have displeased the powers that be have been subject to treatment that in my opinion was retaliatory in nature. For example, LTC Will Britt, one of the most solid soldiers I've ever served with, received what was described to me as a mediocre Officer Evaluation Report, and stated at his farewell gathering that the Defense Meritorious Service Medal he received (something given as a matter of course to other departing officers) had been obtained only through extraordinary measures taken by the instant chain of command. Likewise, the travails of Col Morris Davis have been widely chronicled, and do not need to be recounted here. I have decided to come forward at this point and share some of my reasons for offering my resignation because I believe I have an obligation to provide truthful information to the court regardless of which side calls me as a witness. I am troubled that the current trial team has apparently denied that I have any relevant testimony to provide to the commission and refused to produce me as a witness without even bothering to ask me what I might actually say if called to testify.

Candace Gorman, an attorney representing two Gitmo detainees, writes on her blog that Vandeveld was even recommended for psychiatric treatment for daring to question the justice of the tribunals:

As with the other heros who have stepped forward to blow the whistle on the underhanded and illegal tactics being used in these military tribunals Col. Vandeveld has now been accused of collaborating with defense counsel and there were even cries of needing to submit Col. Vandeveld for a psychiatric examination. It seems everyone who questions these kangaroo proceedings is considered by the military to be crazy!

This is the 4th prosecutor to resign from the tribunals in protest - Maj. John A. Carr, Maj. Robert J. Preston, Col. Morris Davis and now Vandevelde. Add to that Col. Stephen Abraham, a highly decorated JAG and military intelligence officer who helped set up the tribunals and catalog the evidence. He resigned in 2007 and blew the whistle on the shoddy and incomplete evidence being used against many of the detainees.

These are decorated military officers. They can't simply be dismissed the way those same concerns are dismissed when expressed by the ACLU or the Center for Constitutional Rights. And what they have revealed is appalling. It's a national scandal that few seem concerned about.