Former chief prosecutor at Guantánamo Bay becomes a chief critic

Until four months ago, Colonel Morris 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, asserting in articles and interviews that Pentagon officials interfered with prosecutors, exerted political pressure and approved the use of evidence obtained by torture.

Now, 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.

Davis, a career military lawyer nearing retirement at 49, said that he would never argue that 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 was “a potential for rigged outcomes” and that he had “significant doubts about whether it will deliver full, fair and open hearings.”

“I’m in a unique position where I can raise the flag and aggravate the Pentagon and try to get this fixed,” he said, acknowledging that he was enjoying some aspects of his new role.

He was replaced as chief Guantánamo prosecutor after he stepped down but is still a senior legal official for the air force.

Among detainees’ advocates, there has been something of a gasp since it was announced last week that Davis would be taking the witness stand in April.

Hamdan’s chief military lawyer, Lieutenant Commander Brian Mizer, said he would offer Davis to argue that charges against Hamdan should be dismissed because of improper influence by Pentagon officials over the commission process. Prosecutors may object, and it is unclear how military judges may rule.

But whatever happens, some detainee advocates say, officials are likely to have difficulty erasing the image of a uniformed former Guantánamo champion challenging them so directly - particularly, some of them said, one who was known for scorched-earth attacks on adversaries, be they terror suspects or lawyers.

“He was the attack dog for the military commission system,” said Zachary Katznelson, a lawyer for Guantánamo detainees.

Last year as chief prosecutor, Davis publicly suggested that a Marine defense lawyer for a detainee might be guilty of a crime for using “contemptuous words” about the president when the marine questioned the fairness of the Guantánamo system.

At the time, critics ridiculed “Moe” as an administration apologist. But in recent weeks, some of them have described him in nearly heroic terms.

Jennifer Daskal of Human Rights Watch called him the most significant insider to tell what he knows about Guantánamo.

“He has put his career on the line,” she said.

Pentagon officials have steamed about the extraordinary role Davis has staked out. Some people with Pentagon ties say the unusual story started as a power struggle between Davis and a Pentagon official who has broad powers over the Guantánamo legal system, Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, who has declined to comment.

Brigadier General Thomas Hemingway, a retired military official who once supervised Davis at the Office of Military Commissions, said this week that he was surprised Davis was attacking the system he once championed.

“That’s not whistle-blowing you hear,” Hemingway said. “It’s a whine.”

In his contentious days at Guantánamo, lawyers who battled him said, Davis was known for a you’re-with-us-or-you’re-against-us style of news-conference warfare, delivered in an amiable North Carolina twang.

He is an experienced military lawyer, with years of work both in the prosecution and the defense. He is the son of a disabled veteran of World War II, and he is married with one daughter.

In interviews this week he was in his combative mode, challenging Pentagon officials to take lie-detector tests and asserting that commanders had praised him in the past.

He portrayed himself as battling political appointees. But he said he still believed that a military commission system could work.

“It’s gotten so tarnished that if we’re going to convince the world that this isn’t some rigged process we have to bend over backward,” he said.

He said the solutions were simple - giving control to military officials. But he suggested darkly that there were “people at key points in the process, that I just don’t know what their allegiance is.”