An American Lion

Phillip Carter

This is far more devastating than I think people realize. Phillip Carter’s resignation from the Obama Administration is a crucial loss on the road to applying the rule of law to the situation at Guantanamo and to the detainees in American custody. This is ten times more devastating than the resignation of Matthew Hoh and it is a troubling sign for the future of this Administration:

The Pentagon’s top detainee affairs policy appointee has quit the Defense Department just seven months into the job, a Pentagon spokesman said Tuesday.

Phillip Carter, a former Army captain and Iraq War veteran, had been an outspoken critic of Bush-era war on terror detention policy as an attorney and blogging commentator.

He got the job of U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs in April, months after President Barack Obama pledged to empty the detention center at Guantánamo. He quit without explanation just days after Obama confirmed in aninterview with Fox News in Beijing that his administration would miss its Jan. 22 Guantánamo closure deadline.

The development apparently took the Department of Defense by surprise. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman declined to say precisely when Carter submitted the resignation, or where he last traveled in a job that took him frequently to Afghanistan, Iraq and the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba.

As of yet, I don’t see where Carter has spoken out publicly. He could be entirely on board with the Obama Administration, and may have, indeed, resigned because of another issue.

Carter is a known blogger and writer on the issues at hand, leaving his Intel Dump blog at the Washington Post in 2008 after rising to prominence as one of the early voices opposing the Iraq War, where he served. He was not a contractor or a temporary employee, like Hoh. He was a fairly prominent political appointee with a sterling resume:

Phillip Carter was appointed as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Policy on April 27, 2009. In this capacity, he is responsible for developing policy recommendations and coordinating global policy guidance relating to detainees. Mr. Carter practiced government contracts and national security law with McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP.  His practice included work with major defense and aerospace firms, focused on government contracts compliance, export controls, security issues, and contractor support to overseas contingency operations. 

Mr. Carter wrote amicus curiae briefs in the landmark national security cases FAIR vs. Rumsfeld and Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, and has participated in various working groups studying the issue of private military contractors on the battlefield.

Mr. Carter served nine years in the Army, in the active, reserve and National Guard components.  During his military career, he served in a number of military police, civil affairs and infantry units, including duty in the Republic of Korea, Iraq, and in the United States. From 2005-2006, he served as operations officer for an adviser team embedded with the police in Iraq’s Diyala province, where he worked closely with the Iraqi police, provincial courts, jails, and government, as well as the State Department-led Provincial Reconstruction Team, to establish and promote the rule of law.  Mr. Carter’s military awards include the Bronze Star Medal, Army Commendation (2 Oak Leaf Clusters), Army Achievement Medal (1 Oak Leaf Cluster), Iraq Campaign Medal, Korean Defense Service Medal, and Combat Action Badge.

The Obama Administration has either lost a talented and dedicated member or it has gained a very eloquent and credible critic of a highly unpopular policy, and we will know soon enough what Mr. Carter thinks of what has been going on. So far, he has resisted appearing everywhere and anywhere with his breathless assessment.

Update on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 by Norman Rogers

Noah Schachtman has more:

I just got off the phone with Carter.“I know this is a Washington cliche, but sometimes the cliches are true,” he tells me. “I made this tough decision for personal reasons, even though I loved the job and the work we were doing. Hopefully I’ll have the chance to serve again.”

I got to knowCarter nearly seven years ago — before he was a military police officer in Iraq, before he was a corporate lawyer, before he was a veterans’ coordinator for the Obama campaign, before he was a well-known defense pundit, and before he moved from Los Angeles to New York to Washington to take his position at the Pentagon. We were neighbors in L.A., and we’ve thrown back a boat-load of sushi and beer over the years. I know he’s had some very real family matters to handle along the way. So I think he’s being straight-up, and not just giving the typical Washington exit excuse.

I think Carter is conflicted, and does not want to do what Matthew Hoh did, and go on television and position himself as a new critic of the Obama Administration. If he has family issues, that’s one thing, and his service is certainly to be appreciated. I think that the Obama Administration has turned out to be the kind of place that it is fairly easy to walk away from, given the fact that so many have already left in less than a year.

It’s just too difficult to discount the fact that Carter resigned when he resigned, and that many of the Obama Administration policies mirror those of the Bush Administration. The problem is, Carter is on record as having excoriated the Bush Administration for those policies.