From The Rachel Maddow Show:
Former Guantanamo prosecutor, Army Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, describes the sorry state of the government's case against many of the inmates at the prison on Guantanamo Bay.
Andy Worthington -- Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim:
On January 13, in a declaration submitted to a Washington D.C. District Court in the case of Guantánamo prisoner Mohamed Jawad, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a former prosecutor in the Military Commission trial system, delivered perhaps the most blistering attack on the US military’s detention program by a former member of the Pentagon’s team to date.
Speaking of the man he was once tasked to prosecute, Vandeveld said prisoner Mohamed Jawad’s continued detention is “something beyond a travesty,” and urged that Jawad be released given a “lack of any credible evidence.”
Some of this information was revealed in September 2008, after Vandeveld (who has served in Bosnia, Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan in the years since the 9/11 attacks, and has received several military awards) resigned as a prosecutor, complaining that “potentially exculpatory evidence” had “not been provided” to Jawad’s defense team, and that his accidental discovery of information relating to Jawad’s abuse helped convert him from a “true believer to someone who felt truly deceived.”
Continue reading the rest of the article here.
