About
I have been a practicing lawyer for 37 years--licensed in Georgia. I did 20 years on active duty in the Army JAG Crops--as did my wife of 36 years, who I met in the JAG Basic Course in Charlottesville. I then did 10 years as a senior civilian attorney in various positions in the Executive Branch of the Federal Government in the Washington, DC area. The first of those jobs was as the Principal Deputy Chief Defense Counsel at the Military Commissions Defense Organization from 2007-2010. I have written a memoir about my time doing that work, which should be published shortly. I then spent about 7 years as an SES attorney at the Department of the Interior, supervising the practice of Indian Law and many other matters. I was able to attend the University of Notre Dame as an undergraduate thanks to a 4 Year Army ROTC scholarship--and that's how I ended up in the Army. I got my JD from the University of Georgia, where I grew up--as my father was a long time History Professor and head of the AAUP at UGA. My main areas of legal practice over the years have been criminal law, environmental law, Indian law, and a range of administrative and civil law pertaining to the federal government.
Featured Work
You Can't Make This Shit Up! Leading the Fight for the Rule of Law in the Guantanamo Bay Military Commissions
You Can’t Make This Sh*t Up: Leading the Fight for the Rule of Law in the Guantanamo Bay Military Commissions
I was an active duty Army JAG for 20 years. When I retired in 2006, I was approached to work as Principal Deputy Chief Defense Counsel for the Military Commissions Defense Organization (MCDO): the team defending people held at Guantánamo Bay in the Bush administration’s “war on terror”. In many senses, the military commissions, created in the aftermath of 9/11, were the antithesis of good national and international law, originally designed to allow the use of evidence obtained from torture to prosecute and convict “detainees”.
At MCDO, truth was (and is) stranger than fiction; we would often invoke the mantra “You can’t make this shit up!” There is another meaning to this phrase: when the Bush administration decided to create (“make up”) the GTMO military commissions and not to use established systems of justice, they were asking for trouble. It is impossible to create a new system of “justice” on the fly, particularly one created to hide illegal practices. Innumerable problems and obstacles were bound to occur.
This insider account of the work of MCDO through the Hicks, Hamdan, Khadr, al Bahlul, and Jawad trials, among others, and the al Nashiri and “9/11” death penalty cases, offers unique insights into the often dark world MCDO attorneys were forced to navigate—including being investigated by the FBI for alleged misuse of classified materials. There was so much at stake: nothing less than the rule of law. Fortunately, there was also room for dark humor: you really can’t make this sh*t up!
