Commander Diaz Sentenced

By Scott Horton

A jury has given Lieutenant Commander Matthew Diaz a sentence of 6 months for giving a list of Guantánamo detainees to a New York law firm, reports the Associated Press. If confirmed by his command authority, Rear Admiral Rick Ruehe, the sentence will likely make Diaz the first political prisoner in recent United States history. He transmitted the names as an act of protest over the mistreatment of prisoners at Guantánamo. A federal court subsequently ruled that the Navy’s decision to withhold the names was unlawful, and issued an order compelling their disclosure–so the Pentagon’s withholding of the names, and not Diaz’s action, was unlawful. In the words of one of the greatest Americans of the nineteenth century, Henry David Thoreau, “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” By condemning Commander Diaz, the military authorities have condemned themselves before the court of posterity.