Joe Conason: A truth teller who deserves justice

X-post from Eds. This really deserves to be read. Our sucky gov't sucking the life out of an honorable man.



A truth teller who deserves justice

Ex-Navy officer Matthew Diaz gambled everything to uphold the rights of prisoners at Guantánamo. Now he may lose his law license.

By Joe Conason



April 4, 2008 | A former Navy officer named Matthew Diaz came to Washington, D.C., on Thursday, eating lunch just a few miles from the Pentagon and only steps from the White House -- those mighty institutions whose imperial will he defied by upholding the legal rights of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he served as a deputy legal counsel.

During the winter of 2005, sometime after he realized that the government was ignoring the landmark Supreme Court decision affording counsel and due process to every alleged terrorist in the military prison, Lt. Cmdr. Diaz printed out and mailed all of their names to civil rights attorneys in New York. That act ultimately resulted in his imprisonment in the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., and the forfeiture of his military job and pension, and may yet lead to the permanent loss of his license to practice law.

But Diaz had come to the nation's capital on April 3 to be praised, not buried -- as this year's winner of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling, which is named after the late soldier and journalist who exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam 40 years ago this month. Sponsored by the Fertel Foundation and the Nation Institute (where I serve as director of a fund supporting investigative journalism), the Ridenhour prize recognizes the bravery of whistle-blowers who uphold American values regardless of personal risk.

The Diaz story is extraordinary, yet profoundly and typically American. Having risen from poverty and tragedy to professional status and prestige through his own hard work, he gambled everything on a principle, and lost.

He grew up in a broken family, moved frequently as a child and often survived on food stamps. His father, a hospital nurse convicted of the sensational serial murders of a dozen patients, ended up on death row in California's San Quentin prison when Matthew was a teenager. He soon dropped out of high school and joined the Army.

Whatever damage his early life inflicted on him, however, it did not destroy his intelligence and ambition, and eventually he obtained an associate's degree in law enforcement, a bachelor's in criminology and, after leaving the Army, a law degree while working for the Postal Service. He joined the Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps and was sent to Guantánamo during the summer of 2004, in part because of his outstanding service record at his previous posts. By then he had been promoted to lieutenant commander and was expecting to move up again soon. The superior officer who evaluated him before he left for Cuba had described him as "the consummate naval officer" and "a stellar leader of unquestionable integrity."

more...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2008/04/04/diaz_gitmo/

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you are a patriot.

my patriotism. This man has it in spades, and look what they're doing to him. :(

Truth matters. It is our job to keep reminding the Dem party and its voters that Truth, indeed, Matters.

We're working on fixing that, though.

And thank you for posting this. Duly noted.

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Thanks for posting...

to the authorities?

Salon mentions it, and I remembered the story at the time Diaz was imprisoned. Here's Wikipedia:

Barbara Olshansky, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, was the recipient of the document, placed alongside an unmarked Valentines Day card.<9><10> While Olshansky had requested a list of all detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, the military had failed to provide one. The list provided by Diaz contained the names of 550 captives. (...) Olshansky suspected the list might have been classified, so she contacted Federal authorities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Diaz

Olshansky wanted the list and the giovernment wouldn't provide it. So then she gets the list from Diaz and the first thing she does is call the FBI? Is it Center for Constitutional Rights or Center for Kissing Cheney's Ass? I'm serious, what was she doing? Here's more detail from NYT:

It hardly occurred to the lawyers that someone inside the detention-camp headquarters might be trying to help them, Olshansky told me not long ago. For all the public debate about Guantánamo, there was little sign that members of the military were defying their superiors. Uniformed lawyers who had been assigned to defend some of the prisoners before military commissions had begun criticizing the rules for those tribunals, but that dissent was explicitly tolerated by the Pentagon. Some Muslim servicemen at Guantanamo, including an Army chaplain, Capt. James Yee, had been investigated on suspicion of disloyal conduct. But that episode and the others seemed to suggest more about the high-security atmosphere of the camp than it did about any internal opposition to how the prisoners were treated. The valentine was different: no one had taken the law into his own hands quite like this.

Olshansky agonized for weeks over what to do. The center’s president, Michael Ratner, initially suggested giving the papers to the press. But after some consultation with other lawyers, Olshansky called the chambers of the federal district judge who was hearing her Guantanamo suit. Olshansky told the judge’s clerk she had received some information that might be relevant to the case. Could she send it over for safekeeping? She said she never expected the court’s response: Olshansky was instructed to turn the material over to the Justice Department instead.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/magazine/21Diaz-t.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all

So a human rights lawyer receives a hot document like this and it never crosses her mind she has a whistleblower on her side? Not even a hunch? It's as if NYT called the FBI and said there was this Ellsberg guy coming to the office to hand over the Pentagon Papers, so would they please drop by and arrest him. Great job!

put yourself in the recipient's position. Wouldn't you think, maybe, must maybe, this was a set up to see if the lawyers would obey the law? It turned out badly but the human right's lawyer did the right thing here as did Diaz.

Makes me always think of Henry Gonzalez, Gore and Kerry.