Lawyer: Defending detainee slowed promotion - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Lawyer: Defending detainee slowed promotion

A Marine Corps attorney says his vigorous defense of a terrorism suspect held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp delayed his promotion by three years. Now he is taking the Navy to court alleging that he was punished for doing his job.

In November 2003, then-Maj. Michael Mori was assigned to defend an Australian citizen arrested in Afghanistan who was eventually accused as an enemy combatant. Mori became a vocal opponent of the military tribunal system at Guantanamo and said the government didn’t want to give his client a fair trial. That, Mori said, stalled his promotion to lieutenant colonel.

What Mori is now looking for, according to court documents, is a reversal of a 2007 decision by then-Navy Secretary Donald Winter denying a request from Mori that a Special Selection Board reconsider his record.

In motions filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia earlier this year, Mori claims the promotion board was biased against him. The Navy asserts that Mori has failed to prove that.

In an Aug. 17 memorandum opinion, U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina denied the Navy’s motion arguing that Winter’s decision be upheld, handing Mori a small victory.

Neither the Navy, represented by Justice Department attorney Ronald Wiltsie, nor Mori’s civilian attorney, Dan Shanahan, would comment at length for this story, citing the ongoing litigation. Mori, who is a senior military judge stationed at Marine Corps Base Hawaii, also declined to comment.

Urbina returned the case to the Navy “for further proceedings,” but it is unclear to either side how long it will take to reach a resolution.

If a Special Selection Board review takes place and the members decide Mori should have been promoted in 2006, Mori would stand to receive retroactive back pay and credit for time in grade.

The controversy was set in motion when Mori was first assigned to defend Australian citizen David Hicks who had been detained in Afghanistan by members of the Afghan Northern Alliance in December 2001, according to published reports.

In 2007, Hicks became the first accused enemy combatant to be tried under the Military Commission Act of 2006 created for Guantanamo detainees.

Mori’s defense of Hicks and vocal criticism of the government’s controversial military commission system was reported in the media, particularly in Australia.

“I thought I was going to be involved with something that operated very much like a court-martial … with military prosecutors, military defense lawyers … military judges, and be doing pretty much what I had been doing, except we were going to be trying law-of-war violations,” Mori told television host Andrew Denton in an Aug. 14, 2006, interview, according to a transcript.

As he developed Hicks’ case, Mori, who spent four years as an enlisted Marine before becoming an officer, openly criticized what he saw as a political initiative rather than a true attempt at justice.

The government, he said, didn’t want to give Hicks a “fair shake,” Mori said in the Denton interview.

“I think his case has become political and … the first military commissions can’t be acquittals. They couldn’t afford that,” Mori charged.

Mori struck a pre-trial agreement for Hicks, who served nine months of a suspended seven-year sentence at home in Australia. Mori was treated as a celebrity in Australia for his stance on the commissions.

But Mori was fighting a battle of his own.

Earlier, in the summer of 2005, Mori’s promotion to lieutenant colonel was turned down by a 21-member board presided by a major general and 20 colonels that met for two weeks and considered majors in 20 specialties, according to the motion for summary judgment document filed by the Justice Department on Feb. 2.

In June 2006, Mori, petitioned the secretary of the Navy to convene a Special Selection Board to review his record in an attempt to correct what he claims was bias against him for his defense of Hicks and his public challenge of the government.

“In his request, the plaintiff asserted that the promotion board members were biased against him because he had ‘diligently and zealously performed the job the Marine Corps assigned [him] to do — defend a suspected terrorist,’ ” according to the Urbina memorandum.

Mori also claims that certain members of the board were adversarial toward him owing to previous dealings; and he asserts that the denial for a review made first by Commandant Gen. James T. Conway and then quickly adopted by Winter in February 2007, was “arbitrary and capricious.”

Mori was promoted by a subsequent board in June 2009.

The Navy’s court brief says Mori presented no evidence that board members had been critical of his efforts to defend terrorists and posits that board members are bound by specific instructions that bar them from discussing matters not contained in a candidate’s personnel file or arising from third-party discussions.