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en years ago today, I informed Gordon England, then the Deputy Secretary of Defense, that I could no longer serve as chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay. I requested immediate reassignment to another post and, within an hour, my request was approved. Soon after, I received an order not to speak to anyone about why I quit.Here’s why I quit. Earlier that day, I had been handed an order, signed by England, that reorganized the chain of command, effective immediately. The order had placed Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann above me, and it had placed William J. Haynes II, the general counsel of the Department of Defense, above Hartmann.Haynes, you might recall, signed the infamous torture memo — the one authorizing enhanced interrogation at Guantanamo that was approved by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Hartmann had arrived a few months before, in July 2007, to serve as chief counsel to the official overseeing the military commissions. He was anxious to get convictions and wanted me to use all evidence, regardless of how it was acquired. For two years, my policy had been that the prosecution would not use evidence obtained by torture, because evidence obtained by torture is tainted. By the end of his first month, Hartmann had already tried to challenge this well-established fact. When I learned that two men who sanctioned torture were above me in the chain of command, I concluded that I could not ensure fair trials for the detainees at Guantanamo. Nor could I put my head down and ignore the fact that the United States employed a practice it had long condemned.I wish I could say that, in the following decade, the U.S. recovered from the shock of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, recognized the errors it made and regained its legal and moral standing on the issue of torture. That would be fake news.