Promotion for Hicks' US military lawyer - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
His client returned to Australia after five years in Guantanamo Bay and Major Mori was sent to Iraq.
"I had been working at the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing in the Staff Judge Advocates office and had gone to Iraq for a short tour there ... working as a prosecutor," he said.
After 18 years in the Marines and after being knocked back for a promotion, he was looking to retire from the military.
But now he has been promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and made a senior military judge...
Although a vocal critic of the military commission process while he was representing David Hicks, Lt Col Mori is now more guarded.
"Luckily I have moved beyond my time at Guantanamo, back into the real court martial system and I think I would leave it at that. David escaped and so did I."
1 comment:
That's a significant sign of approval from the U.S. military there. There must be a message in it somewhere.
My dad was career Army, a lawyer in the Judge Advocate General corps, as a matter of fact. But the rules for Army officers are that if you get passed over for promotion twice, you're drummed out. (With an honourable discharge, but still bounced.)
He got as far as major, but the military decided it did not need a lot of ineffectual middle-aged paper-pushing blowhards who had never been in combat. (He really did want to go to Vietnam when he was a lieutenant, though, I kid you not.) So Dad was mustered out and had to find work with the federal government in Washington, D.C. for another 15 years. (Which is why my mom, the Republican who hates socialism, is getting survivors' benefits from his two government pensions, in addition to her Social Security. No socialism there, eh?)
Anyway, the military has no compunction about turfing laywers who it doesn't want. The fact that someone (probably "someones" plural) kept him on is a sign that the Army hasn't decided to go totally blind authoritarian.
It puts me in mind of a story I read in The Age Saturday magazine a few weeks ago about a Mao-era guy who still puts out a scholarly publication that mentions the Tienanmen slaughter and the name of the Inner Party member who tried to stop it. (ICBB to look up either of their names, but you read all that newspaper stuff, so you know what I mean.) Somewhere in the communofascist power structure, they've decided not to stomp out EVERY bit of alternate opinion, for whatever obscure reason. Must be something like that at work in the U.S. military.
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