The former chief military prosecutor for the war crimes tribunal at the U.S. naval detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba said he would testify on behalf of the personal driver for Osama bin Laden, Salim Ahmed Hamdan. Air Force Col. Morris Davis told The Associated Press Thursday he would appear at the Hamdan trial. “I expect to be called as a witness … I’m more than happy to testify,” Davis said, calling it “an opportunity to tell the truth.”
Hamdan's military counsel, Lt. Brian Mizer, told the AP they will argue that political interference referenced in reporting by The Nation this week violated the Military Commissions Act. The Nation reported that the general counsel for the Department of Defense, William Haynes, said in August 2005 that anything less than a successful prosecution of the argument presented by the U.S. government in the war crimes tribunal would cast the entire legal process in a bad light.
Davis further alleges in The Nation that the entire legal process is politically biased to legitimize the process by appointees of the Bush administration. Davis wrote in a Dec. 10, 2007, piece for the Los Angeles times that he "concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system." In an interview with The Nation, Davis said that the process "had become deeply politicized" to the point that he resigned from his position in protest.
Davis backed up his allegations in The Nation citing the August 2005 conversation he had with Haynes, who coincidently now sits in an oversight position for the tribunal process at the Pentagon. Davis claims he pointed out to Haynes that some of the Nuremberg cases resulted in an acquittal, “At which point, (Haynes's) eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can't have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can't have acquittals. We’ve got to have convictions,'” Davis said.
The Bush Administration nominated Haynes for a lifetime seat on the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. The Fourth Circuit previously gave the Bush administration near carte blanche authority in its handling of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarius Moussaoui, Yaser Esam Hamdi, and "dirty bomb" suspect Jose Padilla. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, S.C., blocked his appointment, however, because Haynes supervised the writing of Defense Department briefings advocating "extraordinary" interrogation tactics. Now, Haynes sits as the general counsel for the Defense Department and oversees the military tribunal established at Guantanamo Bay.
Military authorities captured Salim Hamdan in Afghanistan in November 2001 with two anti-aircraft missiles in the trunk of his car. The U.S. government claims he worked as a key al-Qaida operative providing support to bin Laden. He faces a life term for conspiracy to commit and providing material support for terrorist activities against the United States. His trial is expected to proceed in April.
