Colonel Morris Davis: The worst of the worst?

Maybe the men traded for Bergdahl weren’t the worst of the worst.  Moe had never dealt with them which meant that they weren’t the worst of the worst or even on the list of 75 to be prosecuted for war crimes.   These men had been at Guantanamo for over 12 years.  They had never been charged.

No one is saying they are no longer a threat to the USA.  There are no guarantees.  However,   the risk will never be zero.

Moe did an excellent job of explaining the situation.  Thank goodness  Chris Matthews wasn’t around to interrupt and answer his own questions.  Alex Witt has far better manners and a more professional journalist.

Moe Davis cyber-stalked by the Washington Times

Just when you think it is safe to tweet, Moe Davis gets cyber-stalked by the Washington Times.  Moe has some 8,000 followers on Twitter.

Washingtontimes.com:

A Howard University law professor and former chief prosecutor of the Guantanamo military commissions took to Twitter on Monday to blast the National Rifle Association amid the Washington Navy Yard shooting.

“Traffic in Capitol area snarled, Washington Navy Yard on lockdown as gunman enters & opens fire … or as we call it in Gun-merica, Monday,” former Air Force Col. Morris Davis tweeted to his nearly 8,000 followers only an hour after the shooting occurred.


 Read More

Colonel Morris Davis to the Prez: Man UP!

Moe Davis was interviewed this week by Christiane Amanpour to discuss  the prisoners still in Gitmo.  Contrast the professional discussion with Christiane Amanpour and the rude way he was treated by Chris Matthews.  What we can learn from Moe Davis, according to CNN.com:

 

Hearing Colonel Morris Davis speak, it’s easy to forget that he used to be the chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay.

“We used to be the land of the free and the home of the brave; we’ve been the constrained and the cowardly,” he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday.

President Obama promised to close the Guantanamo detention facility when he took office in 2009; four years later, it’s still open.

A majority of the detainees, over 100, have been on hunger strike for more than three months to protest their detention; the military has resorted to force feeding them.

Eighty six of the detainees, Davis said, have never been charged with a crime. Many of those who were convicted of crimes were sent back to their home countries, and many are now free.

“It’s a bizarre, perverted system of justice,” he said, “where being convicted of a war crime is your ticket home, and if you’re never charged, much less convicted, you spend the rest of your life sitting at Guantanamo.”

A scant six years ago, as chief prosecutor at Guantanamo under President Bush, Colonel Davis sounded like a true believer.

On Friday the Gitmo hunger strike will be 100 days old.

 

Colonel Davis speaks frankly about President Obama and Gitmo

Disclaimer:  The content of the guest contribution is the opinion of the guest and does not necessarily represent the opinion of the management of Moonhowlings.com.

Some things just have to explain themselves.

Colonel Morris Davis speaks with RT.com:

“The slogan “Close Guantanamo” sounds fairly simple. Actually following through and doing it is a much more difficult process,” he said.“Guantanamo is still open, the military commissions have resumed and in my view the president just didn’t have the balls to follow through with doing the right thing.”


 

Interview on RT about Guantanamo, indefinite detention, and the drone program.

So, is Colonel Davis spot on?  Did President Obama learn more information or does he simply lack the …nads?  I want to think he learned things were harder once one became president than  during a campaign when the decisions aren’t real. 

Are issues of war always that cut and dry?  My guess is that things look easier from the outside than from inside, when you know all the facts and what you have to work with.  Take Harry Truman for example.  How would you have liked to have been that poor bastard?  He knew nothing about the atomic bomb.  Here he was FDR’s vice president.  He knew NOTHING about this weapon that he had to make the final decision to drop. 

Harry Truman always seemed like the practical sort from what I have read. But can you imagine he didn’t know about the atomic bomb?  Churchill knew there was such a thing but our own vice president did not.  What was FDR thinking?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/truman/player/

 

 

Morris Davis: A Terrorist Gets What He Deserves

 

The following Op-Ed by Colonel Morris Davis appeared in the NY Times on the Ghailani Trial on Friday, November 19, 2010.

 

A Terrorist Gets What He Deserves

By MORRIS DAVIS

Washington

CRITICS of President Obama’s decision to prosecute Guantánamo Bay detainees in federal courts have seized on the verdict in the Ahmed Ghailani case as proof that federal trials are a disastrous failure. After the jury on Wednesday found Mr. Ghailani guilty of only one charge in the 1998 African embassy bombings, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, called on the administration to “admit it was wrong and assure us just as confidently that terrorists will be tried from now on in the military commission system.”

The verdict — in which Mr. Ghailani was found guilty of conspiring to blow up United States government buildings and not guilty on 284 other counts — came as a surprise to many, but the outcome does not justify allowing political rhetoric like Senator McConnell’s to trump reality.Read More

Colonel Morris Davis: Perfecting a More Perfect Union

Colonel Morris Davis published some of his thoughts on being an American and and what it takes to nourish our country:

My father was a 100 percent disabled veteran of World War II. He left home a healthy man in the prime of life and returned seriously disabled by a broken back during a training accident. My earliest memories are of him going to the Bowman-Gray Hospital at Wake Forest University for multiple surgeries, spending weeks at home in bed in a full-body plaster cast, his back and leg braces and crutches, and the hand-controls that let him drive without using the gas or brake pedals. Like many of his generation – and like many of the men and women I see now at Walter Reed Army Medical Center – there was never a word of bitterness over what he lost, only pride in his country and a bond with others who served in defense of democracy.

Robert Hutchins, former Dean of the Yale Law School and Chancellor of the University of Chicago, said “The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.”

I believe that living in a democracy is a privilege, not a right, and each citizen has a duty to do his or her part to ensure the privilege isn’t lost to future generations. That was a lesson I learned from my father at an early age. I joined the Air Force a few months after he died and served for 25 years, in part because of his example.

Volunteers for military service aren’t apathetic or indifferent about democracy. They pledge to support and defend the Constitution, and many make the ultimate sacrifice; I saw proof every morning when I drove by the white stone markers aligned in rows at Arlington National Cemetery on my way to work. We owe them a duty to do more than just passively surrender to the challenges we face; we have an obligation to participate in working towards solutions.

It says something when we cast nearly as many votes to select the next American Idol as we do to select the next American president, when more can name the “Plus Eight” that belong to Jon and Kate than the eight members of the Supreme Court remaining when Justice John Paul Stevens (Navy veteran) retires, and when Tiger Woods wrecking his marriage and his SUV is the lead story on the national news. Too many of us are too absorbed with the superficial world of celebrities and the schadenfreude of their calamitous lives.

The most basic duty of citizenship is participation, something Americans do less than citizens of most other countries. Almost all eligible voters in Australia – about 95 percent – cast ballots in national elections; typically a little more than half of eligible voters in the U.S. do the same. That’s a sad fact. There is no excuse for being uninformed on issues and there is no excuse for not voting. In my view, you forfeit the right to pontificate if you’re too lazy to participate.

I’m involved in the Coffee Party, a group that promotes civil discussion about issues and greater public participation in the political process. I don’t believe any political party or any group along the ideological spectrum has a monopoly on good ideas, and I believe we should be able to discuss issues and ideas without hurling insults and threats. We seem to lose sight of the fact that we’re all in this together.

We have the power and the ability to prove Hutchins wrong and to advance the ideal the Founding Fathers envisioned – continuing to perfect the union, doing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and passing these privileges along to those that follow – if we just have the will.

Colonel Davis seems to have great hope for America. Will the ideals envisioned by Colonel Davis win in the end or will apathy indifference and a slow extinction become our fate?