Defense Official Resigns Over Detainee Remarks

I've covered this matter before.

A senior Pentagon official responsible for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said he finds it "shocking" that top US attorneys are rushing to defend "terrorists" locked up there.

"The major law firms in the country ... are out there representing detainees," Cully Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, said in a Federal News Radio interview Thursday, available online.

"And you know what, it's shocking," he said.

This was the astonishing position held by Cully Stimson, revealing that under the Bush administration, the concept of innocence until proven guilty had been all but abandoned. The very fact that a person had been held in Guantanamo Bay, was for Stimson sufficient proof of guilt that no lawyer should ever consider defending such a person. Indeed, he went further and said that:

"I think quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms."

So he not only tried to discourage lawyers from defending persons held at Guantanamo Bay, he went further and suggested that lawyers who did so ought to be boycotted by leading firms.

I said at the time:

If the Bush regime have any last remnant of decency, they will fire him. But watch this space, they won't.

However, it would appear that whilst I was correct that they wouldn't fire him, they have at least put sufficient pressure on him to fall on his own sword. From the New York Times:

A senior Pentagon official resigned Friday over controversial remarks in which he criticized lawyers who represent terrorism suspects, the Defense Department said.

Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said Charles ''Cully'' Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, told him on Friday that he had made his own decision to resign and was not asked to leave by Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Stimson said he was leaving because of the controversy over a radio interview in which he said he found it shocking that lawyers at many of the nation's top law firms represent detainees held at the U.S. military prison in Cuba.

''He believed it hampered his ability to be effective in this position,'' Whitman said of the backlash to Stimson's comments.

As his position included responsibility for the men detained at Guantanamo Bay, I should think his comments "hampered his ability to be effective in his position" a great deal.

It's only right that he has gone, although I can't help thinking that Gates has missed a good opportunity to signal that there has been a clean sweep after the Rumsfeld years at the Defence Department. He should have personally fired him and kicked him out of the Pentagon. Then we'd really know that things had changed there.

We can be thankful for small mercies though, at least Stimson did admit that he was leaving because of those inane remarks, rather than expressing some wish to spend more time with his kids.

Click title for full article.

tag: Cully Stimson, Guantanamo Bay, Robert Gates,