The former chief prosecutor at the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is set to testify for the defense in the upcoming trial of an ex-driver for Osama bin Laden, the defense team said Friday.
Colonel Morris Davis, who resigned from his post in October, is to testify on behalf of Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni accused of delivering weapons to Al-Qaeda operatives and whose trial by a special military commission is to open in May.
"We do expect him to testify," said one of Hamdam's lawyers Andrea Prasow, referring to Davis, an Air Force officer whose duty from 2005 to 2007 was to oversee investigations and cases brought against terror suspects at Guantanamo.
Davis explained in a New York Times opinion piece earlier this week that he resigned over a conflict with his superiors on whether information extracted through waterboarding, a technique widely considered torture, could be used in trial.
"My policy as the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo was that evidence derived through waterboarding was off-limits. That should still be our policy," Morris wrote.
"To do otherwise is not only an affront to American justice, it will potentially put prosecutors at risk for using illegally obtained evidence.
"Unfortunately, I was overruled on the question, and I resigned my position to call attention to the issue," he said.
"There are some bad men at Guantanamo Bay and a few deserve death, but only after trials we can truthfully call full, fair and open."
Davis told The Nation magazine on Thursday that the man who now oversees the military tribunal process for the Pentagon, general counsel William Haynes, has pressed for convictions at the controversial war on terror prison.
"I said to him (Haynes) that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process," Davis was quoted as saying.
"At which point, his 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.'"
Asked for comment, a Pentagon spokesman said: "We dispute Colonel Davis' allegations." The spokesman denied that there has been any politicization of the military commissions.
