the, the, the most citizens of most countries are patriotic. whether that's misguided or not, we all want to believe in our governments, our leaders and their policies. and when we don't, we all want in value,

the right to protest to petition or elected officials for change to vote in free and fair elections and to alter policies with which we disagree. we're going to tell you a story today that is going to make you angry. we're going to tell you the story of a man who became an attorney and a middle east scholar, a man who believes in the american constitution and the rule of law. a man who wanted to do the right thing by working to ensure that every body has the same rights and protections as everybody else. and then it all fell apart. i'm john kerry onto welcome to the whistle blowers the the. 2 2 2 2 2 a. 2 today i want to tell you the story of tim john summerlin. he was a one time remote defense attorney for several of the most notorious accused terrace in modern american history. khalid shaikh mohammed,

the alleged mastermind of the september 11th tax major in the dial, hudson. a member of the us military who self radicalized, launched a terrorist attack at the us military base in fort hood, texas, and murdered 13 people in wounded 30. and while lead been attach, it was considered to be all kite, a royalty, a murder, and a $911.00 co defendant. as a part of this top secret security clearance, tim had to promise that he would not reveal to any of these men, that he also happened to be gay. overtime. tim built a report with k s m. and while lead, they taught him about their lives and the group developed the level of mutual respect and trust. one day, while we gave him a warning saying this one day, all of you on this defense team will turn against one another. you americans devote your lives to prestige fame and money. you will turn against each other in the end just to get that for yourselves. a n e. and that's actually what happened. the lead

attorney and her assistant begin plodding against the other defense attorneys in an attempt to make themselves indispensable. they begin bullying gas lighting and scape coding the other attorneys on the team. this was all of course, at the expense of the clients who would be on trial for their lives. when tim vocalized, his concerns about this misconduct, the attorneys turned on him and they told the title leaders that he was gay saying ridiculously, that he was lusting after them. the pentagon quickly fired him from the defense team. but then something unexpected happened. while lead been a tash, supposedly one of the most dangerous and murderous men in the world, left to tim's defense, he wrote a letter to the judge, exposing the other lawyers lies. the other defense attorneys protested and brought additional problems to the case that we'll discuss in a minute. but what is this new found and so called lavender scare that lives at

depending on and how is it that i'll try to comes to the defense of a gay american man. when the american government tries to destroy him, i'd like to welcome doctor tim john sommerling attorney, mentally, scholar and author. tim, thanks for being with us. thank you, john. it's a great opportunity to see you and to be on yourself. i'd like to start with your background and qualifications to take on a position like one condo, defense attorney. you're not just an attorney, but you're also a middle east experts. so tell us about your life, your education, and your progression to this important position. well, it actually all starts with me being a flight attendant for american airlines for 25 years. i was flying the flights between chicago and paris in dallas and paris. and i spend a lot of time going back and forth to egypt because i had fallen in love with it,

particularly falling in love with the, with the silence and the smells of egypt. and the people and particularly them was in call. i was really, really fascinated by that. so i started um but decided go, go to get a ph. d and in arabic and eric studies. and i wrote a couple of books on the palestinian israeli conflict and put in political art in the conflict and a book about a serial typing of arabs and muslims in, in the american popular film. and then $911.00 happens. and the beginnings of the war on terror happens and then i heard the news stories about i was raving the discussions about torture with airbags and lessons. and um, i saw home like crew members and how passengers were treating arabs and muslims passengers and, and i, i wanted to go to law school to help stop this hatred and this discrimination. and so in law school for the next 3 years, i focused on human rights studies and on death penalty. and then 6 months after i

got out of law school, i found myself on the, on the fort hood case. as the mitigation expert, i was hired by the i by the army, and then over the next 14 years i am, i serve as mitigation expert for over 40 cases for men, women, and children who we're in jail and facing the death penalty or facing life imprisonment how did you get involved, specifically in the defense of one condo defendants? was this something that you sought out, or was it something that found you so to speak? it's a little of both john, i, you know, in law school i, you know that what just of 2006 to 2009, i was studying cases like how i'm done versus rumsfeld. and i was study, you know, booming teen versus bush and i, i also was doing lectures on rendition we, we didn't know much about rendition at the time. and so i remember going to london

at the school of oriental napkin studies and, and giving a lecture and how we could build stories about rendition. and i went to ask them to you and did the same that same lecture. and then i found myself working for care the counselor evans, lot of relations trying to um and we were studying people who were arrested for um, airbags and looking for a respite during this time period for it supposed to terrorism. and it was my last school objective to get this case, but i certainly didn't know how to go about doing it. and then when i was on the fort hood case, my name started getting around for the fact that i was this knowledgeable person about them. you know, the middle east and i had experience with air, you know, i was speaking arabic and i had experience with, with death penalty cases. and i was making this problem with, with the hosp. but when the war court was opening up in 2011,

there was mad rush to get experts like mitigation experts like myself. and i got a call from this out of the blue. i got a call from the lead lawyer at the pen attached team. and it took over a year for me to get my um, security clearances and have the a military commissions appointment with mr. natasha mitigation expert. so it was just a little about that because you were asking, what was it like at 1st being in the room with some of the most dangerous men in the world? how long did it take you to build a relationship of trust? and how did that relationship develop? you know, what i got to say. so what kind of the dive in right away? i was eager to do that and i wanted to get to work. you know, i had done all my academic research on the middle east. you know, and, and grad school and i was, you know, i was really into topics of colonialism and resistance. and i had previous clients and i developed an article way of working with them these men. and these women, which, you know, would done some awful or,

or being charged for doing some very awful things. but these people were americans and despite our subcultures of race and, and, you know, economics and stuff were all still americans. but during that year of waiting while i'm waiting there to do this case, you know i, i have to start working and i start studying, you know, things about um you know, as long as the revival and i start studying, you know, the, the literature of the as lot of your bible and islamic jihad during the russian invasion back again to see if i'm looking at the site quit to. i'm looking at a go, i'd some and all their writings. and so as educating myself as well as best as i could on 911 with the literature that was available. so i had to listen to the distortions that i was getting from thomas friedman and from samuel huntington and from richard clark and the bush administration. but once,

once i got into that room into that court room, i knew that i was as close to the center of knowledge about $911.00 and about what half of what happened in a box and islamic jihad that i was ever going to get. but it still was going to be an unprecedented challenge with me for me because here i was now working with enemies of the united states was not working with americans like i had been working with before. so it took me about a year to gain mr. ben natasha trust, i saw on the someone who needed help fee and i both told each other as enemies. and i had to work really hard to show him that i was really there to help protect his life. i don't think it was. i think it was about a year later that it was only when mister uh, when can someone mr. mohammed actually gave me his um, approval that mr. ben akash then accepted me on powerful. you've written

a book about this whole experience called my enemy, my defender, which is being published by sky, worst publishing in new york. in the book, you talk about the backbiting and difficult relationships that the guantanamo defense attorneys have with each other. tell us about that dynamic and about why those relationships are so difficult. so john, i was on a field was a lead lawyer whose group on the case was tenuous at best because of their different medical relationship between that and the lawyer and mister brand task. and that led to a lot of paranoid and panic for the lead lawyer. and the lead lawyer had this minion attorney who was a us a up uh united states air force captain a. and as they have convinced themselves that the best way for them to remain on the team was to make themselves indispensable to the government and to mr. bennett to us. and so they thought that they could remain as the most knowledgeable the most trusted,

the most continuous members on the team for the length of time they could be there forever. so therefore, they had to have this continual purging, apparently that was underneath that men of anyone who gain more knowledge of the case or that know i have more trust or mr. bennett, tash or anyone who might threaten the lead lawyers knowledge or outbreak. the dominion captain and um, so there was always somebody on the chopping block and they would get helpers to help them get rid of people. and once a target was selected and then bullied, and then purge, they move on to the next verse. and so i'm getting rid of people concluded gas lighting, bullying, setting people up for failures and you know, finding on team members, family members, and then reporting that to each other. and then um and picking up reporting it to

mr. bennett tosh. and then in some cases they did and in my case it was this forced outing that they did to me about my sexuality in the trying to plan. but the trip home a full. yeah. but the real question is like, why would they do something like that other than panic and other than then you know, paranoia, but there was the motivation is because well, panel is the bonanza. you know, as long as you can stay on that bucking bronco, you can, it was in the hands. i mean, the salaries for lawyers, lawyers are up to $500000.00 per year. a. i'm just going to travel around the world and these top hotels and these world capital or a fee food towers in bottles of wine and thousands of travel miles that you get along with it. and then there's this idea that this is a historical case. and you'll get appearances on 60 minutes and you get your full patients for yourself on the new york of your opinions on new york times. and there

you go. and the mon documentaries and, and as we see in the more canyon there's, there's movie potential as well. and you know, it sounds fun to you meet these, these movers and shakers in the world of human rights. and um politicians and, and, and it's funny that we laugh at it now. but you know, it was a chance to give you the to people who are around charlie rose is table telling all the knowledge that only you knew. thank you, tim, for going to take a short break. and when we come back, we're going to ask him similarly about how things changed for him, make one tunnel and about why the enormous pedagogy bureaucracy also turned against him. stay to the. 2 the, the welcome back to the list of lawyers. i'm john

kerry, onto we're speaking with tim john sommerling. he's an attorney middle east expert, former guantanamo defense attorney and the author of the new book, my enemy, my defender. thanks again for being with us. tim. thank you, then tim, there are several issues that i'd like to raise with you. first. i want to talk about the possibility of these guantanamo defense attorneys that you've written and spoken about. you're right, that the hostility and jealousy are systemic. it's not just the attorneys, you say in the book that that this still the, extends to the judges and indeed it's throughout the entire system. can you tell us about that? you know, the defense organization was, was led by a general and he had this mantra and his monitor was, i choose the people who's on the defense team, lead lawyers, they run their defense teams. i give them the tools and the shoes, they get what they get, the,

unless they get the who they get. and so she had basically built this like cement ceiling where we're all of us below. if we had real problems, we couldn't go to him and say there's real problems here. and i had always spoken with him twice, but the lead lawyer in the cabinet somehow convinced this guy that i wasn't a team player. it was my turn on the chopping block that i was not some team player and that i was actually dangerous to the team when the captain and i had a disagreement about whether i could talk to mr. ben natasha or i could not talk to him at this particular point. um mr. ben attached wanted me to go to the, to the, to the general and say, you know, tell them the truth of what's going on. i contacted the general for a meeting and if you contact me back with a number of emails that said, you know, let's set this up, here's the time and here's the place. but when i got to the meeting all with, with, with my preparations all in the hands of the general wasn't there. and i realized

that i had been brought into an ambush situation and in the workplace, my being that the general himself, it setup legal out of your end, the captain had set up that with him the night before. right? so at that meeting, what they do is they fire me and the lead lawyer says, the general asked us to do this. um, so they forwarded me off the island and handed me a letter and then the letter is past the pages the day before the meeting was supposed to play place and it says that i was fired. so this is all pre planned by him and it's traumatic is that was i 5000 that story because it matches up with the way that things are done at the d o. d and at the kind of guy. and in that the military commissions because 2 years after i was released, harvey wish a cough was doing the reading a story, the man who the general reports to and then richard cough,

lieutenant colonel gary brown, who was 2nd in charge. they were negotiating a plea, deal with it, with the defense teams to, to, to try to get these stall trials moving. and so they were trying to get a pre deal to take the death copy off the table. and brown, later complained on n p r. he said that he and richard call were ambushed. they were called in to um, under false pretences. they were called into a meeting at the pentagon and then handed letters with no explanations. that they were fired, that our credentials were fees and they were sorted out of the building. so on n p r brown was complaining how they were treated. but when it happened to people like me or other people, i got this, these 2 who are in charge secure less. but when it happened to them, they were calling it a dirty trick. so another example is when i made my complaints to my attorney

military board, i haven't turned the registration board about how it was forced out by the captain and by the, by the lead lawyer. and the general jumped in and sent a letter to my attorney registration board and says that i was the one who caused serious damage to defend cease. and he includes 2 letters. i'm a government stationary by to new lawyers would come onto the team. one of the letters that i was like to logically unstable and the other one said that i should be barred from ever being on a death penalty case. again, because i have some spin garlic influence over terrorist. those are the ones that are there now. as for the judge, there's another story about the judge in the transcript. it shows that mr. bennett passed wanting to get rid of the lead lawyer and the captain after i left and the one of the representatives. so because he couldn't trust them anymore. and then the transcript, he says, i can't work with somebody with cheats me and causes me psychological harm. and so

he wrote these letters to the judge paul stating that the, the judge stating that the, the lawyers, the lawyers are putting lies about me into motions. and he wanted to just know that he was making decisions based upon lice. but the judge wouldn't accept the natasha as letters because they had be written by a lawyer and in the motion form and been natasha saying, these lawyers aren't going to write a letter to. it's going to mean that they're going to get fired. i'm going to do nothing right and motion to that means it's going to get fun. they're going to get fired. so the judge s one of the new lawyers on the team, if they will help. well, mr. going to pass a he refuses to do it. and the judge has to the court and say to everybody in the court a basic law principle. and he says to everyone that the ultimate loyalty of the quote of the attorney is to the client, not to the other attorneys. and so he pointed independent counsel that helped mister brain akash like this. most of the general dent steps in and says there's no

need for any special counsel. this is where he makes that i give them the tools speech and the judge canceled the independent counsel and the planes, mr. bennett trash for all the problems that he's having with his lawyers. and now the letters that we're showing, the truth were never made into motions. a very interesting point that you make is that what this behavior, what the systemic attitude amounts to is a continuation of something known as the lavender square. and there are several parts to this point. you say, depending on scape codes, l g, b, t, q, americans to preserve its own power, that it weaponized is sexuality. that it makes it assumption that l g b t q employees are somehow a higher security risk risk, which of course, they are not. and that the policy forces people to out themselves give us some more detail. here is the situation really that malignant will. let me start by saying

that despite with mr. buying this thing the last year about the lavender sir be a past. and despite what some of the baldwin and sen cain are now doing, trying to get a resolution for an apology for the lavender, sir, they're only taking it up to 2011 to and their only thing is for government employees and for military personnel. mice story, 2015 as a contractor that works with the government. my story show that the lavender scare tactics are not extinguished. they are not extinguished with the passing of time. so i want to make sure that i'd say to these, to, to the, to the, to the, to the, to the politicians that, that the, the, let's not pick wash this very, very serious problem that you have there. and the government so looked up when they fired me leave the lawyer demanded that i give them my resignation.

otherwise they were gonna fire me. and when i refused to give a resignation, they had back themselves into a corner to fire me. and then she's threatening me and she said exactly what she said, i will frame the type of mitigation expert you are. i will say what i believe which could negatively affect your future as a mitigation expert. don't you dare do anything about this. all of this has been documented and reviewed by experts. that's what i was told when they went to mr. bennett tosh, they had to explain to him why they fired me. and that's when they let the secret out of me being gay. and when he didn't react the way they wanted him to react, they had up the anti. and they told him that i had less full interest in him. and that they had to protect him for me. they went to the rest of the team and then they glowed at about it about what they said and i still for the life. and we can

understand how when the world can my, my sexuality could have anything to do with saving this man's life. but mind you, while they told everyone else they didn't want me to know about what they had done, and it wasn't until 6 months later that a, a cat, that a sergeant on the team who is having a very big moral dilemma with what was going on and was very traumatized. that was what's going on. asked to come see me, came out here from what i came out to chicago from washington and actually told him what they did. and i had the choice to make. if i fight this, i'm gonna owe myself further or do i let them do it and get away with it? and what i think about as all the security analysts, all of the officers of both discharge and all the lawyers who are on the team that, that are all held to a higher standard. none of them had the courage or the forwarded to the step up.

and to report this only that small, lowest level, the lowest ranking person on the team could. and once i found out and i started asking more questions of other people than that, people started feeling a little more church and they stepped up and they started providing me with prom rating evidence about what was going on. and so when, like i said, when i started filing things, i had to help myself further. and there were internal investigations that these people have to run now because that they were getting complaints for me and they were being run by the mob or some. so the general and the lead lawyer and they weren't interested in finding out whether it was the truth of the matter. what they were interested in finding out was, who are the moles on their and were telling me the truth. so when i filed my complaint with the offices, i wanted to say there's just, there weren't just 2 people involved. this went through the whole v o t that went through. i was assured that i went to the office of inspector general of the d. o.

d. it went to the under secretary of defense for readiness and personnel, and it went to the, does it deal with these ethic boards? but my case was closed within a month and i heard nothing back from any of these people. but i did, you know that the lead lawyer and the captain were aided and abetted and that they were condoned and they were rewarded and they were protected and defended. and when i went to the court to seek justice, the deal in j joint in and help them feed this. i secret and hide the truth. so even today, 9 years later, 9 years later, despite all the evidence that we have, they still want to sign with me. they're now sending me letters of, of the many that i don't not tell my story that i don't tell the truth. and then it's threatening me with my attorney license and the livelihood and,

and they want to silence the victim to protect the perpetrators. well, i've read the book and i can tell you that it is absolutely true. terrific interview. thank you for your insights. tim carl heinrich will ricks is known as the very 1st game man to publicly announce his sexual identity. born in germany, in 1825. his coming out was a historic watershed event. he said, quote, i am proud that i have found the courage to view the initial blow to the hydra of public contempt and quote, those are powerful words. and yet here we are 200 years later. and the hydra of discrimination, hatred, and contempt still has not been slain. indeed, it's alive and well. and it's living in the pentagon. i'd like to think our guest tim john sommerling for being with us today, and thank you to our viewers for joining us for another episode of the whistle blowers. i'm john kerry. aku,

please follow me on subject at john curiosity. and we'll see you next time. 2 2 the, the, the position i was suggesting fell great. i was suggesting that we send americans and the bridges on the drain and put on your bill. is us on

obama move dining? probably now now a lot to him, but it's don't know when he is here. all the youngest will tell you that you will see the most of classes in the middle. if it is what i normal file a post post. most. most of our thoughts on this one is not at the guidelines, so we'll see how much, you know, we're running it may be, you know, a lot less radioactive and then something is active uranium, but still it's radioactive. it has toxic 0 thinking killed the laptop. you want me to go and see what he's of us here. again, let's see the echo seats. the boeing that i don't know, the museum old. i was suggesting we pharma fell great. the web bill. call us. what day was the

man id effected against the still not absolutely certain whether our goals were achieved. the 90 people are killed in on the idea of strike on gaza. but these are the problem minister says he's not 2nd whether the attack achieve its goals. beijing slums, washington to resolve to bet ox that bite inside into law. say new drugs lead to as is fine, as the fast may be a trigger for retaliation. measures done to national color up of a terrorist attract ross of slums within the decision to stop the inquiry into the nodes. freedom the pipeline. sample size.