Not Your Typical DFH

Today's NY Times has an interesting article about one of the Guantamo military defense lawyers. It seems that Lt. Cmdr. William C. Kuebler, military lawyer for Gitmo detainee Omar Khadr, has been raising all sorts of cain over the way the Military Commission which will try his client has been set up.

The Bush administration’s war crimes system “is designed to get criminal convictions” with “no real evidence,” Commander Kuebler says. Or he lets fly that military prosecutors “launder evidence derived from torture.”

“You put the whole package together and it stinks,” he said in an interview.

Lt. Comdr. Kuebler is the man who released the press report that revealed that interrogators engaged in questionable techniques were ordered to destroy their notes afterwards. He also has spent a great deal of time agitating in Canada, his client's homeland, trying to get that nation to bring some pressure to bear against the stacked trial.

Just another misguided liberal hippy? Well, not exactly.

Kuebler, according to the article, is a born-again Christian who has always voted Republican. It's just that he apparently takes his religion's tenets seriously, as seriously as he takes his military oath to defend the constitution and his oath as an attorney to represent his client vigorously. As a result, what he sees as a mockery of justice dressed in terms of a "fair trial" sickens him.

And it's not like he's going to benefit from his actions. I think it pretty likely that his career as an officer in the US Navy has pretty much been derailed.

I guess courage comes in all sorts of packages.