Morris Davis, an Air Force colonel, was the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay from 2005 to 2007. He resigned over the admissibility of evidence obtained from waterboarding. Davis believed it should be banned but was overruled. In an Op Ed piece Unforgivable Behavior, Inadmissible Evidence in today’s NY Times, Davis puts the matter starkly:
Virtues requiring caveats are not virtues. Saying a man is honest is a compliment. Saying a man is “generally” honest or honest “quite often” means he lies. The mistreatment of detainees, like honesty, is all or nothing: We either do stuff like that or we do not. It is in our national interest to restore our reputation for the latter.
There are some bad men at Guantánamo Bay and a few deserve death, but only after trials we can truthfully call full, fair and open. In that service, we must declare that evidence obtained by waterboarding be banned in every American system of justice. We must restore our reputation as the good guys who refuse to stoop to the level of our adversaries. We are Americans, and we should be able to state with conviction, “We don’t do stuff like that.”
After the Bush administration’s revolting tolerance of torture and inhumane behavior, I do not know how America recovers herself and restores her image and reputation in the world.
