This didn’t get much attention over the weekend, which is a shame because it’s a pretty important story.
A military jury recommended Friday that a Navy lawyer be discharged and imprisoned for six months for sending a human rights attorney the names of 550 Guantanamo Bay detainees.
Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz was convicted Thursday of communicating secret information about Guantanamo Bay detainees that could be used to injure the United States and three other charges of leaking information to an unauthorized person.
The jury of seven Navy officers recommended that Diaz receive his pay and benefits while incarcerated, but the sentence must be approved by Rear Admiral Rick Ruehe.
Depending on one’s perspective, Diaz, an 18-year Navy veteran, is arguably something of a hero. As a Judge Advocate General, he saw first hand the abuses that were going on at Guantanamo Bay. Near the end of a six-month stint, Diaz took it upon himself to surreptitiously send a detainee list — inside an unmarked Valentine’s Day card — to the New York Center for Constitutional Rights in January 2005. (The FBI tracked the list back to Diaz via fingerprints.)
“I had observed the stonewalling, the obstacles we continued to place in the way of the attorneys,” Diaz told The Dallas Morning News. “I knew my time was limited…. I had to do something.”
In fact, the Morning News article noted that Bush administration officials have characterized the Guantanamo population overall as “the worst of the worst.” That is one of “two misstatements, or false statements, that occurred about Guantanamo,” Diaz said. “The other statement was ‘We do not torture.'” Diaz, whose job it was to track and investigate allegations of abuse, added, “I think a good case could be made for allegations of war crimes, policies that were war crimes. There was a way to do this properly, and we’re not doing it properly.”
The closer one looks at Diaz’s story, the more dejecting it is.
Did he intentionally release names of detainees that the government wanted to keep secret? Absolutely. But the prosecutor in the case insisted that the information Diaz leaked “puts at risk lives of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines on the front line in the war on terror,” an argument that looks a lot less legitimate when one considers the fact that a federal judge later ordered the administration to release the list anyway.
Obsidian Wings noted the other day:
I don’t know precisely what the legal issues are. I’m not so familiar with the military justice system. I would think that the federal court order that this information be released under FOIA demonstrates that it was not properly classified, and I would really like to see the prosecution prove that it actually put soldiers’ lives at risk….
[But] now it seems that a soldier who turned over a list of prisoner’s names to some civil rights lawyers, so that they couldn’t be held indefinitely without trial, may go to jail for longer than a number of soldiers and CIA agents who beat prisoners to death.
It doesn’t seem right, does it.
For what it’s worth, Diaz was facing a sentence of up to 14 years in prison, and was sentenced to six months. Given that the jury recommended he keep his pay and benefits during his incarceration, there must have been at least some sympathy for the man who did the right thing by breaking the law.