Whistleblower
Posted on | October 22, 2007
Navy lawyer Lt. Cdr. Matthew Diaz lost his career trying to help the invisible detainees at Guantánamo Bay:
On May 18 this year, after a weeklong trial, a panel of seven naval officers convicted Diaz on four of five counts, including one of disclosing secret defense information that “could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation.” By then, nearly two and a half years after Diaz had left Guantánamo, the politics of detention policy had shifted. The detainees’ names had been released under the Freedom of Information Act. The Supreme Court had ruled against the administration once more, upholding the minimum standards of the Geneva Conventions and derailing the military commissions. The president declared that he would like to close Guantánamo as soon as possible.
Diaz did not testify during the trial. But in a statement to the jurors before he was sentenced, he sounded overcome by remorse. “I didn’t want to make waves and jeopardize my career,” he told the jurors, who could have sent him to prison for 13 years. “I am disgraced. I am ashamed. I let the Navy down.” After three hours of further deliberation, the jurors issued a notably light sentence of six months’ imprisonment and dismissal from the military.
When we spoke a couple of months later at the brig in Charleston, Diaz was less contrite. He said he bore no resentment toward Olshansky and the Center for Constitutional Rights for turning his valentine over to the authorities; in fact, he was sending the group donations of $25 a month. Looking back, he insisted that he tried to do the right thing in the wrong way. “There was nothing else that I could really do,” he said. “I could have gone up the chain. But nothing I said would have ever left the island.”
