The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU [2]) filed a lawsuit Jan. 8 against the Library of Congress on behalf Col. Morris Davis [3], the former chief prosecutor for the Guantánamo Bay [4] military commissions. Davis, who was employed at Library's Congressional Research Service (CRS), resigned as the military commissions' chief prosecutor in October 2007 and became an outspoken critic of the commissions, writing articles, giving speeches, and testifying before Congress that the system is fundamentally flawed. In the lawsuit, the ACLU alleges that Davis was terminated by the CRS last year due to opinion pieces about the commissions, in violation of his rights to free speech and due process.
In resigning as military commissions prosecutor after 25 years in the Air Force in October 2007, Davis said that he was pressured to use classified evidence [5] against defendants. He claimed that the push to use classified evidence stemmed from certain military officials' desire to keep the trials closed, and complained that the officer who served as legal adviser to the military commissions, Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann [6], should not have been supervising his work. (Jurist [7], Jan. 10)
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