Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
Miami Herald
May 18, 2007
A Navy jury convicted a former Guantánamo lawyer of leaking a secret detainee list in 2005 in a verdict that could carry a 14-year prison sentence.
By Carol Rosenberg
A military jury Thursday convicted a Navy lawyer of spilling national security secrets by mailing a list of Guantánamo detainees to a New York City human rights group -- inside a Valentine's Day card.
A seven-member jury of naval officers convicted Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz, 41, a JAG officer, of four charges in less than three hours.
Conviction can carry a maximum 14 years in prison. Sentencing was slated for today after character testimony and Diaz's expected first-ever explanation.
The jury cleared Diaz of a single charge, punishable by 10 years in prison, of knowing that he could endanger national security when he hit a print button at the remote Navy base in southeast Cuba to produce the list in January 2005.
Diaz was deputy director of the detention center's legal office at the time he mailed the names.
The recipient of the list, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, was filing unlawful-detention lawsuits against the Bush administration, and seeking to match names and nationalities to 500-plus nameless, faceless detainees.
The Pentagon refused to provide the names, and it would be more than a year before the names became public in a Freedom of Information lawsuit.
Diaz's lawyer said after the trial that his client had been driven by a ''moral dilemma'' over what he saw as Bush administration stonewalling a lawful request to identify captives in indefinite detention.
Diaz knew he was defying Pentagon policy, said defense attorney Patrick McLain, but he thought he was complying with a federal judge implementing a ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court.
On hearing the verdict Thursday evening, the career Navy officer's wife, ex-wife and 15-year-old daughter huddled in a circle and sobbed inside the court at Norfolk Naval Station.
At the trial's end Thursday, the prosecutor told the court-martial that Diaz knew the list was classified after a six-month assignment there and was acting out a personal agenda.
''It wasn't by accident. It was deliberate, with purpose. It brings dishonor and disgrace on him,'' said Cmdr. Rex Guinn.
He cast the Valentine as ''a card that contained the nation's secrets'' in part because it contained coded serial numbers for each detainee that Guantánamo's intelligence chief testified at the trial reflected ``sources and methods.''
The list that Diaz mailed inside the Valentine was never made public.
Instead, lawyers at the New York law center founded to defend Martin Luther King Jr. turned it over to a federal court, which in turn alerted the FBI and tracked the list back to Diaz using computer forensics and fingerprinting.
Navy Capt. Daniel O'Toole, the judge, earlier sided with the government and forbade Diaz's three-lawyer team from arguing a so-called justification defense.
His attorney said Diaz, whose father is imprisoned for murder, believed that even war-on-terror detainees were entitled to lawyers.
McLain argued that, even after six months working on the intelligence computer, Diaz didn't know what the serial numbers meant.
Or, as Diaz sees it, ''He did the right thing in the wrong way,'' said McLain.
May 18, 2007
A Navy jury convicted a former Guantánamo lawyer of leaking a secret detainee list in 2005 in a verdict that could carry a 14-year prison sentence.
By Carol Rosenberg
A military jury Thursday convicted a Navy lawyer of spilling national security secrets by mailing a list of Guantánamo detainees to a New York City human rights group -- inside a Valentine's Day card.
A seven-member jury of naval officers convicted Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz, 41, a JAG officer, of four charges in less than three hours.
Conviction can carry a maximum 14 years in prison. Sentencing was slated for today after character testimony and Diaz's expected first-ever explanation.
The jury cleared Diaz of a single charge, punishable by 10 years in prison, of knowing that he could endanger national security when he hit a print button at the remote Navy base in southeast Cuba to produce the list in January 2005.
Diaz was deputy director of the detention center's legal office at the time he mailed the names.
The recipient of the list, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, was filing unlawful-detention lawsuits against the Bush administration, and seeking to match names and nationalities to 500-plus nameless, faceless detainees.
The Pentagon refused to provide the names, and it would be more than a year before the names became public in a Freedom of Information lawsuit.
Diaz's lawyer said after the trial that his client had been driven by a ''moral dilemma'' over what he saw as Bush administration stonewalling a lawful request to identify captives in indefinite detention.
Diaz knew he was defying Pentagon policy, said defense attorney Patrick McLain, but he thought he was complying with a federal judge implementing a ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court.
On hearing the verdict Thursday evening, the career Navy officer's wife, ex-wife and 15-year-old daughter huddled in a circle and sobbed inside the court at Norfolk Naval Station.
At the trial's end Thursday, the prosecutor told the court-martial that Diaz knew the list was classified after a six-month assignment there and was acting out a personal agenda.
''It wasn't by accident. It was deliberate, with purpose. It brings dishonor and disgrace on him,'' said Cmdr. Rex Guinn.
He cast the Valentine as ''a card that contained the nation's secrets'' in part because it contained coded serial numbers for each detainee that Guantánamo's intelligence chief testified at the trial reflected ``sources and methods.''
The list that Diaz mailed inside the Valentine was never made public.
Instead, lawyers at the New York law center founded to defend Martin Luther King Jr. turned it over to a federal court, which in turn alerted the FBI and tracked the list back to Diaz using computer forensics and fingerprinting.
Navy Capt. Daniel O'Toole, the judge, earlier sided with the government and forbade Diaz's three-lawyer team from arguing a so-called justification defense.
His attorney said Diaz, whose father is imprisoned for murder, believed that even war-on-terror detainees were entitled to lawyers.
McLain argued that, even after six months working on the intelligence computer, Diaz didn't know what the serial numbers meant.
Or, as Diaz sees it, ''He did the right thing in the wrong way,'' said McLain.