Lt. Cmdr.Matthew Diaz was one of those models of that upward mobility so prized by Americans as the signature of democracy. He worked hard for whatever he achieved, first when he enlisted in the US Army and then serving 10 years as a Navy lawyer, where his performance evaluations were outstanding. So when he was assigned to Guantanamo as deputy legal adviser, all expected more of the same.
But one thing was wrong with Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz ... he had a conscience. And for acting on that conscience, he became the first American accused in a criminal prosecution of spying for giving classified information to ... another American. And what was that classified information? The names of "detainees" in Guantanamo, something the Bush administration wanted to keep secret ... from the American people. Talk about the idea of espionage turned on its head...
This NYT article describes how his conscience made him do it:
Diaz’s indignation at the government’s policies had been building since he arrived at Guantánamo. He did not doubt that there were dangerous men there. But he had come to believe that the Pentagon was misrepresenting how the detainees were treated and the threat some of them posed. As a lawyer, he found the recalcitrance of the White House indefensible. The Supreme Court had spoken. Why couldn’t the administration go before a judge and show why these men should be held indefinitely and without charge? "I feel like I’m on the wrong side," he confided to a couple of the lawyers who were representing Guantánamo prisoners.
Diaz had a basic understanding about human life and human rights and Gitmo
shocked him at every level, even as he entered the facility:
Diaz had seen his share of prisons, both military and civilian. But he had never seen anything like the wire-mesh cages at Guantánamo. The prisoners looked more sad than fearsome, Diaz said. In Camp 4, where more-compliant detainees lived in barrackslike quarters, Diaz came upon an older prisoner shuffling along with a walker. "This is what I’d been told were the worst of the worst?" he recalled thinking. One detainee stuck out his hand as Diaz walked up. He took it without thinking, and the guards shot each other looks. "I thought, O.K., I shouldn’t do that."
This incident describes the general prohibition on humanizing detainees, a prohibition Diaz found unconscionable, especially the denial of habeus corpus. What pushed him over the edge may have been forced participation in faking or making up reasons, plots, phantom possibilities of danger, that would serve the administration's purpose in detaining these men without rights. As Diaz said, "We were just throwing up these obstacles in the way of implementing the Rasul decision."
Finally, he translated his conscience into action.
He mailed the list to New York offices of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a left-wing legal-advocacy group that opposed the administration’s Guantanamo policy and had just recently asked the Bush administration for that very list, knowing the request would be denied. Upon receiving it, they didn't really know how to respond, believing at first that this was some kind of joke or government trap. No one even imagined that someone from the US military would take such a dangerous step on his own, based solely on his own conscience. The list was given first to the court handling their lawsuits against the US government - a rather odd move, in my view, and certainly reckless on some level - who instructed them to hand the document directly to the Justice department. It was a short hop, skip and jump to tag Diaz with the deed.
This past May, Matthew Diaz became the only United States serviceman to be convicted and imprisoned for an act of insubordination directed at the Bush administration’s detention policies
Thus it came to pass last May that after a trial lasting one week, a panel of 7 Naval officers rendered their decision and convicted Diaz on 4 out of 6 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." Even though he never actually gave it to a "foreign nation." Does that mean those who oppose Bush policies were then considered "foreign" in some not-quite-defined way?
Ironically, by that time, the detainees’ names had already 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. Apparently, this didn't help Diaz, even though the whole point of the prosecution was to supposedly "protect" Anericans against the release of names as this could somehow put us "at risk" of terrorism. How, of course, defies all logic. Chalk it up to "strategery."
Meanwhile, although initially remorseful, Diaz later said, "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." Now after being disbarred from practicing military law, he faces disbarment from civil law as well, and wonders how he will support his family.
Finally, at last he was recognized for his sacrifice on behalf of honesty with the Ridenhour truth-telling award, at which hestated,
"I'm being recognized for an act of conscience."