Colonel Morris Davis was a former Chief Prosecutor of the Guantanamo Bay military commissions. Davis resigned from his position in 2007, and soon became one of the most outspoken critics of the military commissions process, even after his his retirement from the military in October of last year.
From December 2008, Davis worked as the assistant director of the Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division at the Congressional Research Service which is part of the Library of Congress, until, according to the ACLU, he was fired for recent op-eds he had written criticizing the decision to try some detainees in federal court and others by military commission.
On Nov. 10, Morris wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the hybrid legal approach would "establish a dangerous legal double standard that gives some detainees superior rights and protections, and relegates others to the inferior rights and protections of military commissions. This will only perpetuate the perception that Guantanamo and justice are mutually exclusive." He wrote a letter to the editors of the Washington Post expressing similar sentiments.
The ACLU says that shortly afterward, Morris was threatened with termination, before finally being fired over his decision to criticize the Obama administration's approach to trying suspected terrorists. The ACLU is claiming that CRS violated Morris' First Amendment rights by terminating him over his personal political views.
-- A. Serwer
