Miami Herald
Carol Rosenburg
The Pentagon on Thursday named a Harvard Law trained career Army general as the chief war crimes prosecutor at Guantánamo, which has two major death penalty prosecutions in the pipeline, notably the 9/11 mass murder trial of five former CIA captives charged as co-conspirators.Carol Rosenburg
The new prosecutor for military commissions helped chair an Obama administration task force that reformed the war court
In appointing Army Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins, the Obama administration chose a 1983 West Point graduate who had served recently in Afghanistan and earlier as a staff attorney to Army Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq. Petraeus is President Barack Obama’s nominee to run the Central Intelligence Agency.
Martins also was one of two men in charge of Obama’s interagency Detention Policy Task Force created early in the administration with the mandate of reviewing Guantánamo detainee files to close the controversial detention center in Cuba by releasing some captives to foreign countries and relocating others to U.S. soil for federal or military trials. Congress thwarted that ambition.
Jeh Johnson, the Pentagon’s top attorney, noted in a statement Thursday that in that task force capacity “Brig. Gen. Martins was himself instrumental in working with other agencies and with Congress in the passage of reforms codified in the Military Commissions Act of 2009.”
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