An attorney who cried over Nixon's resignation offers an insider's view of detainee hearings at Guantánamo

another card is pulled from the bushco house of cards...

a profile of the man who was perhaps the most instrumental in getting the supreme court to agree to hear the detainees' case...

In June, Colonel [Stephen E.] Abraham became the first military insider to criticize publicly the Guantánamo hearings, which determine whether detainees should be held indefinitely as enemy combatants.

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Colonel Abraham arrived at the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants during a chaotic period in September 2004.

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It was obvious, Colonel Abraham said, that officials were under intense pressure to show quick results. Quickly, he said, he grew concerned about the quality of the reports being used as evidence. The unclassified evidence, he said, lacked the kind of solid corroboration he had relied on throughout his intelligence career. “The classified information,” he added, “was stripped down, watered down, removed of context, incomplete and missing essential information.”

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In a hearing on Oct. 26, 2004, a transcript shows, one detainee was told that another had identified him as having attended a terrorism training camp.

The detainee asked that his accuser be brought to testify. “We don’t know his name,” the senior officer on the hearing panel said.

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“Anything that resulted in a ‘not enemy combatant’ would just send ripples through the entire process,” [Abraham] said. “The interpretation is, ‘You got the wrong result. Do it again.’ ”

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As it turned out, lawyers at his sister’s firm, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, began representing detainees in 2006. Though she is not involved, she mentioned that her brother had worked on the hearings.

Last month, one of the lawyers, Matthew J. MacLean, a former Army lawyer, called Colonel Abraham and asked him to look at an affidavit filed in May by Admiral McGarrah.

Colonel Abraham said the admiral’s affidavit, describing the hearing process as orderly and considered, had convinced him that he had to step forward. He began to describe his experience.

“This was it,” Mr. MacLean said last week, “the first evidence of how these tribunals operated from the inside.”

Mr. MacLean called Colonel Abraham for the first time on June 8. The detainees’ lawyers filed his seven-page affidavit in court on June 22. It was sharply critical of the hearings and the evidence they used, saying “what purported to be specific statements of fact lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence.” On June 29, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear the detainees’ case.

needless to say, the operation to discredit abraham, a lifelong conservative and highly decorated counterespionage and counterterrorism army reserve intelligence officer, hardly one to be accused of being a bleeding heart liberal, is now in full swing...

• He has been called a whistleblower and a traitor.

• Pentagon officials say his account indicates that he misunderstood the purpose of the hearings, known as combatant status review tribunals or C.S.R.T.’s, which the officials say “afford greater protections for wartime detainees than any nation has ever provided.”

• [A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler of the Navy said], “Lieutenant Colonel Abraham was not in a position to have a complete view of all the evidence used in the C.S.R.T.’s, as well as the process as a whole.”

• Pentagon officials have said such criticism is not meaningful because a combatant status hearing “is not a criminal trial.”

every person who summons the courage to speak out serves as an inspiration for others who may be reticent to come forward... it is these people who are the true heroes of our republic, because they must may be the ones who will ultimately save it...

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