Lieutenant-Colonel Yvonne Bradley is an attorney.
She is a life-long Republican. She is a Christian conservative (her description of herself)
Though her name is probably familiar to readers of the British press, where she took London by storm a few months back, her recent interview on CNN will probably make a lot of waves in the US, if it doesn’t get buried. So pass it on.
You see, Yvonne Bradly was the military attorney who was assigned to represent one of the detainees at GITMO, Binyam Mohamed.
Lieutenant-Colonel Bradley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ge… has been a military lawyer in the United States for 20 years. Bradley spent six years as a regular officer in the judge-advocate general’s branch of the US Air Force and worked for a further seven years for Reprieve, an organisation providing legal representation to death row inmates. Bradley is notable for volunteering to serve on behalf Guantanamo captives. Having volunteered following an appeal for military lawyers to take up the cases of Guantanamo Bay detainees in 2005, Bradley became the defence counsel for British resident Binyam Mohamed, who was held at the prison camp for five years before he was released on 23 February 2009. Bradley’s evidence of Mohamed’s torture while in US custody, and of British intelligence involvement in his interrogation, provoked a political scandal in Britain.
On 5 February 2009, as a result of persistent torture allegations and criticism that Britain was keeping supporting evidence secret, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband made a statement to the House of Commons concerning Binyam Mohamed’s case. Four days later, Yvonne Bradley traveled to Britain to urge the Foreign Office to press harder for Mohamed’s release from Guantanamo Bay. Bradley told BBC News that her client was very ill as a result of a hunger strike. “Mr Mohamed needs to be released now and not later,” said Bradley. When asked why he was still at the camp, despite charges being dropped and the British government saying it was pressing for his release, she said: “That’s the million dollar question. He should not be there.”
I apologize for not being able to embed the CNN Interview so I request that you listen to it, in its entirety.
CNN has not yet released a transcript of the full interview.
There is a clip I can embed here, but the interview itself is more powerful:
Amnesty International did a two part interview with Bradley in February.
Also in February, Julie Sell wrote a long piece on Bradley, An Air Force lawyer fights to free a Guantanamo inmate in which she gives details about how Bradley became involved with defending a purported terrorist.
Bradley, who grew up near Philadelphia, got her law degree at Notre Dame two decades ago and began practicing law in the Air Force. She joined the military, she said, because it would expose her to different types of law and give her a chance to travel. She spent six years on active duty, including a stint on a U.S. airbase in Saudi Arabia. She then took a job in a federal public defender’s office representing convicts on Death Row, where her most notorious client may have been Harrison “Marty” Graham, a convicted serial killer in Philadelphia. “I was glad there was a piece of glass between Marty and I,” Bradley recalled. She continued to serve in the Air Force Reserve, which normally involves a commitment of one weekend a month and two weeks a year, and after about six years in the federal public defender’s office, she set up a solo law practice in the leafy Philadelphia suburb of Swarthmore.
In 2005, Bradley, then a major, got a call from Col. Dwight Sullivan, the chief defense counsel for Guantanamo Bay inmates at the time. “He said he had the perfect case for me,” she recalled. Partly because of her work with inmates on Death Row, she said, Sullivan wanted to partner her with Stafford Smith, who also had defended Death Row inmates and was already working on Mohamed’s case. Stafford Smith, who has dual British and American citizenship, recalled that he initially was wary about working with a Republican military lawyer.
Now obviously fond of Bradley, who’s spending this weekend at his home in southern England, Stafford Smith added: “That just goes to show you how wrong we were – almost every stereotype you can think of turns out to be wrong.” Her views have changed dramatically since she joined Mohamed’s legal team in 2005. She said that when she was assigned to his case, she was “a true believer” in America’s campaign against terrorism.
Bradley recalled that after she got a call to defend Mohamed at Guantanamo Bay in 2005, she was ready to shut down her law practice in suburban Philadelphia. “I knew these were war crimes,” she said of the charges against her client. Then she received orders that her assignment would last 90 days. “That should have been my first warning that something was wrong,” she said. “I can’t try a small possession of marijuana (case) in 90 days, let alone a major war crime.”When Bradley first visited Mohamed at Guantanamo Bay, she recalled, she was “scared,” although as a federal public defender she’d represented a serial killer and other murderers on Death Row. “I believed my government when they told me he was a terrorist,” she said.
Since that time Bradley has changed her perceptions, not only of GITMO, and the detainees there, but of her own government. She is not a woman to mince words, and during her interview on CNN made it clear that she would not allow the obfuscatory term “enhanced interrogation techniques” to be used, stating simply and firmly that her client was tortured.
She goes on in the interview to describe her reaction to hearing her client describe, (she believes truthfully) having his genitals cut, being beaten and starved, and threats of castration while in US custody.
Her statements were not made by one of us suspicious leftie types. It is ironic that the interview was aired by CNN and then we were treated today by another self-serving “speech” from Darth Cheney who used fear-mongering (9/11 mantra) and continued to defend his position on torture (oops – yes he calls it interrogation)
Bradley was interviewed in uniform.
She is a brave member of our armed forces, who spoke out and defended her country, the Constitution, and her responsibilities to a legal code of ethics.
Ms. Bradley I salute you.
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