LOS ANGELES: Last week, in a news cycle dominated by Attorney-General Alberto R. Gonzales’ latest woes, the conviction and sentencing of Lt-Cmdr Matthew M. Diaz made hardly a ripple. On May 17, Diaz was found guilty of leaking secret information about Guantanamo detainees. According to prosecutors, Diaz was intent on aiding enemies of the United States and endangering US troops.

His crime? Diaz, a career Navy lawyer, made the foolish mistake of believing that the US government should respect the basic rights of the Guantanamo detainees.

In 2004, the US Supreme Court held (in Rasul vs Bush) that the hundreds of anonymous Guantanamo detainees who had been held incommunicado for years were entitled to seek judicial review of their detentions, with the assistance of lawyers. But when attorneys for the Center for Constitutional Rights — the group that had successfully brought the Rasul case to the high court — requested a list of detainees, the Defense Department refused to provide it.

Appalled by what he saw as an effort to circumvent the court’s ruling, Diaz, who was then the deputy director of Guantanamo’s legal office, printed out a list of detainees and sent it — anonymously — to the rights group.

What Diaz did was foolish and wrong. He should have gone up the chain of command to protest the Defense Department’s decision, or resigned. But in the poisonous atmosphere of Guantanamo — where cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners was authorized, where showing simple humanity was considered suspicious and where minor dissent from administration policy could lead to severe career consequences — Diaz felt he had no choice. In 2005, when investigators discovered it was Diaz who had released the list of detainees, military prosecutors came down hard on him. They piled on multiple charges, enough to put him in prison for decades.

Ironically, in 2006 a federal court declared that the list of names of Guantanamo detainees was public information and the government released it to the Associated Press. But this came too late to help Diaz, whose rash gesture was still prosecuted as aggressively as if he’d sold nuclear secrets to Iran.

When Diaz sent the list of detainee names to the rights group, he already knew what human rights advocates suspected but couldn’t prove: that many Guantanamo detainees were merely Taliban foot soldiers or, in some cases, innocent men who had been wrongly detained, and that the detainees had been subjected to illegal interrogation techniques.

As Diaz put it in an interview with the Dallas Morning News, the administration’s claim that the Guantanamo detainees were “the worst of the worst” was one of “two misstatements or false statements that occurred about Guantanamo…. The other statement was ‘we do not torture’”.

The aggressive prosecution of Diaz stands in depressing contrast to lackadaisical government efforts to prosecute US personnel implicated in detainee abuse cases. —Dawn/ The Los Angeles Times News Service