WASHINGTON, 16 May 2007 — A military trial has begun for US Navy lawyer accused of passing secret information about Guantanamo Bay detainees to a civilian human rights lawyer.
Lt. Cmdr. Matthrew Diaz is accused of sending the names and intelligence about 550 Gitmo detainees two years ago in a Valentine’s Day card, prosecutors said Monday. Diaz’s actions endangered the lives of the detainees and American troops on the front line in the war on terror, prosecutor Lt. James Hoffman said during opening statements in Diaz’s court-martial at Norfolk Naval Station based in Virginia.
“This case deals with the deliberate, intentional, conscious release of classified information,” Hoffman told the jury of seven Navy officers.
Diaz is accused of printing out the list of names — along with various identification numbers, detainees’ citizenship and the team that was interrogating them. Hoffman said Diaz mailed the card on Jan. 15, 2005, his last day in Cuba, cutting the pages “so that the nation’s secrets fit inside the card.” Barbara Olshansky testified that the document in “this weird valentine” she received in early 2005 was not marked classified.
At the time, Olshansky worked for the Center for Constitutional Rights. She said the nonprofit legal group was suing the federal government to obtain the names of detainees because the US Supreme Court had ruled that the detainees had the right to challenge their detention.
But defense attorney Lt. Justin Henderson said the information Diaz printed out from an office computer was not marked classified and that Diaz had no reason to think that the document “could be used to injure the United States.” Olshansky also testified that she never had met or spoken with Diaz and that the center was able to obtain some detainees’ names from lists compiled by other organizations, such as Amnesty International.
Last year, in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by The Associated Press, the Department of Defense released the names of the Guantanamo detainees, their ages and home countries.
The detainees’ names since have been declassifed but the charges stand because they were classified at the time Diaz is accused of leaking them, said Beth Baker, a Navy spokeswoman.
Robert Kates, a computer expert who created the database used to centrally manage intelligence collection about the detainees, testified that he had traced the document to Diaz by reviewing logs and determining that Diaz was the only person to submit a query for that particular set of data and print it.
Diaz, 41, of Topeka, Kansas, remains free and is stationed in Jacksonville, Florida.
Diaz faces up to 24 years in prison if convicted of charges including printing secret information related to national defense and giving the information to someone not authorized to receive it.
