Six months

It is telling that this Navy lawyer, Matthew Diaz, convicted of four of five counts, received a sentence of only six months.

As the end of his tour approached, Diaz’s frustration was growing. The prisoner-abuse files that he and others had compiled now filled two large binders. One statement, from a senior F.B.I. official, suggested that the military authorities had ignored complaints from bureau agents about harsh interrogation techniques. Another recounted a detainee’s claim that a guard had thrown him to the ground and rubbed his face violently in the dirt after the prisoner spat at him. Diaz found the report credible — the file included a photograph of the prisoner’s mangled face — and was surprised that it was not included among the allegations that the military made public.

In the statements they would later make to F.B.I. investigators, Diaz’s colleagues at Guantánamo generally described him as professional, affable and laid-back. Some of them were more impressed by him than others. But few of his fellow officers had much sense of Diaz the iconoclast: the lawyer who disdained the continuing war in Iraq, who quietly avoided social gatherings with more gung-ho government lawyers and who sometimes broke away from the caste society of the military to hang out with Jamaican and Filipino laborers who worked on the base.

Diaz was careful not to challenge the way things were done, he told me, and discreet about his views on Guantánamo. “I pretty much kept my thoughts to myself,” he said. “I didn’t broadcast them.” To the wider military community, he could even sound a little gung-ho too. As his time at Guantánamo was winding down, his colleagues suggested to the public-affairs office that Diaz would make a good subject for a profile in the task-force newsletter, Behind the Wire. The resulting article, “Fifteen Minutes of Fame with Lt. Cmdr. Matt Diaz,” told of a Latino kid who “left life on the street at 17,” worked his way up the ranks and made good as a Navy lawyer.

“What do you like about Guantánamo?” the interviewer asked him.

“I like the mission,” he said. “For the most part, everybody is trying to do the right thing, and I like being part of that and contributing.”

One afternoon in July, as we sat at a picnic table in the sweltering visiting area of the Charleston brig, I asked if he really believed what he had said. He said he did, describing soldiers and officers who went out of their way to act decently toward the men who were being held as terrorists. “They were usually just too far down the chain to make any kind of difference,” Diaz said.

Diaz’s own inability to make a difference grated on him. Pentagon investigators who were preparing a report on Guantánamo abuses seemed to ignore some of the cases he helped assemble, he said. Despite the first visits to prisoners by civilian lawyers, little information about their treatment seemed to be getting out. On Nov. 8, 2004, a federal district judge shut down the military commissions, ruling that they violated international law. But the case then moved to a conservative appeals court, where a reversal was widely expected. “I felt like nothing was ever going to change,” Diaz told me.

On Dec. 21, the Pentagon copied him on a letter from Barbara Olshansky at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Nearly six months after the Supreme Court decision in Rasul, she was still asking the government for the names and nationalities of the detainees so that lawyers could file habeas petitions on their behalf. In a draft response, the administration wrote that the detainees had other ways to obtain representation.

While other military lawyers felt that the detention camp was finally starting to open up to outsiders, Diaz was appalled by what he saw as the government’s obstinacy. “No matter what the courts said, they would just keep stonewalling,” he said. “I knew that if I didn’t do anything, nobody else was going to.” Working late one night, he logged onto a secure internal database to see what lists he could find. It was easy; he could bring up the names 100 at a time. Diaz said later that he did not ponder how the information might be received in New York. “I thought they would either file a petition on behalf of those detainees or maybe contact their families,” he told me.

As he lay in bed at night, Diaz said, he thought about the risk he would be taking if he went ahead. Over the previous year, the military had prosecuted or disciplined several servicemen for taking classified materials off the island. Security had been tightened. The Guantánamo counterintelligence officer slept in the next bedroom of the town house Diaz shared with several midlevel officers. The career for which he had worked so hard would be on the line. He was within striking distance of a promotion to commander, or of retiring with an officer’s pension.

Diaz would later say he didn’t know the information he mailed off was classified. The lists he printed out were not marked “Secret,” although officials later acknowledged that they should have been. His lawyers emphasized that he had access to much more sensitive, top-secret information than anything he sent. Diaz also said he hadn’t known the meaning of all the alphanumeric codes that followed the names. But one of those codes identified the prisoners who had given information to Guantánamo interrogators. Military intelligence officials described that code — not the names — as the significant leak.

On May 18 this year, after a weeklong trial, a panel of seven naval officers convicted Diaz on four of five counts, including one of disclosing secret defense information that “could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation.” By then, nearly two and a half years after Diaz had left Guantánamo, the politics of detention policy had shifted. The detainees’ names had been released under the Freedom of Information Act. The Supreme Court had ruled against the administration once more, upholding the minimum standards of the Geneva Conventions and derailing the military commissions. The president declared that he would like to close Guantánamo as soon as possible.

Diaz did not testify during the trial. But in a statement to the jurors before he was sentenced, he sounded overcome by remorse. “I didn’t want to make waves and jeopardize my career,” he told the jurors, who could have sent him to prison for 13 years. “I am disgraced. I am ashamed. I let the Navy down.” After three hours of further deliberation, the jurors issued a notably light sentence of six months’ imprisonment and dismissal from the military.

I'm guessing the jurors approved of his actions but had no choice but to convict.