Reports of torture at Guantanamo and the political posturing on the issue in Washington left us wondering how people in responsible positions at the prison felt about what was happening there. From Common Cause comes a list—a partial list—of heroes who bucked their superiors to defend Geneva Conventions standards for treatment of captured enemies.
Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, a prosecutor with the Office of Military Commissions, in 2004 refused to carry on with the case against accused al Qaeda operative Mohamedou Slahi after he learned that the evidence against Slahi had been obtained by torture. It was at a church service with liturgy including a phrase about respecting the dignity of every human being that Couch decided to listen to his growing doubts and resist pressure to prosecute Slahi.
NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service) Deputy Commander Mark Fallon protested to NCIS leaders about abusive interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo and refused to participate in torturing prisoners there. His bosses passed his complaints on to Alberto Mora, General Counsel for the Navy, who took them up with the Pentagon. Mora's request for change led Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to halt some of the more aggressive interrogation techniques.
Though he was a career military interrogator, Air Force Colonel Steven Kleinman stopped an interrogation session at Guantanamo in 2002 on the grounds that protracted slapping of the detainee violated the Geneva Conventions. On other occasions he stopped abusive interrogations, though he was marginalized by increasingly hostile Guantanamo authorities.
U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Task Force Commander Col. Brittain P. Mallow refused to torture Guantanamo detainees and even ordered Task Force investigators not to engage in torture. He repeatedly urged superiors in the Defense Department to develop less abusive, more productive interrogation methods. His story and the other stories are reminders that it wasn't just people at a safe distance who protested against what they saw as war crimes on their watch.
