and 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 attacks. major needle has been a member of the us military who self radicalized launched a terrorist attack at the us military base at fort hood texas, and murdered 13 people in wounded 30. and will lead been a dash who 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 7 n y lead. they taught him about their lives and the group developed the level of mutual respect and trust. one day will lead 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. in the end, that's actually what happened. the lead attorney and her assistant began plodding against the other defense attorneys in an attempt to make themselves indispensable . they began 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 all kind of leaders that he was gay saying ridiculously, that he was lusting after them. of 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 kind of comes to the defense of a gay american man. when the american government tries to destroy him, i'd like to welcome dr. 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 kind of 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 to move was in the call. i was really, really fascinated by that, so i started decided that i would go to get a ph. d and in arabic and eric studies. and i wrote a couple of books and the palestinian israeli conflict and put in political art and the conflict and a book about a serial typing of arabs and muslims in, in the american popular film. and then by 11 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 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, 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 the fort hood case as the mitigation expert. i was hired by the i by the i'm 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 which is a 2006 to 2009. i was studying cases like how i'm done versus rumsfeld and i was study, you know, bloomgreen 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 oriental napkin studies and, and giving a lecture and how we could build stories about rendition. and i went to some of you and did the same that same lecture. and then i found myself working for care. the counselor evans islamic 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 in 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 progress was not high. 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 penn attached team. and it took over a year for me to get my um, security clearances and had a military commissions appointment with mr. natasha is mitigation expert. so it was just a little above that you guys 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 and what kind of the dive in right away. i was eager to do that and i wanted to get to work. um, you know, i had done all my academic research on the middle east, you know, and in 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 with, you know, what 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 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 islamic revival, and there's lot of jihad during the russian invasion back in assess, i'm looking at. so i clicked 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. bennett houses trust i saw on the someone who needed help fi and i both call 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 back biting 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 feeling 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 usa up united states air force captain a. and as they had convinced themselves that the best way for them to remain on the team was to make themselves indispensable to the government and to mister bennett

task. 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. therefore they had to have this continual purging, apparently that was underneath that men of anyone who gain more knowledge of the case. so that now i have more trust or mr. green, a task, or anyone who might threaten the lead lawyers knowledge or outbreak. the dominion captain, and 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. ben attachment. in some cases they did and in my case it was this forced outing that they did to me about my sexuality in the time, the plain but featured home a full. but the real question is like, why would they do something like that other than panic and other than then, you know, paranoid it, but there was the motivations. cuz well, panama was the bonanza, you know, as long as you can stay on that bucking bronco, you can. it was a pin. 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 in 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 their speed go. and 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. we're 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

russian states never as one of the most sense community invest. i'll send some of the assistance must be the one else calls question about this, even though we will bend in the european union the kremlin mission, the state on the russians cruising and split the r t spoke neck, keeping our video agency roughly all the band on youtube tv services for the question, did you say steven twist, which is the,

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for them mean forget to when it comes to that anymore when defend donasia, that they just do counter russian. and i think the central asian countries are very well aware of the fact, and they tried to use that a notion for data on the welcome back to the list of lawyers. i'm john curiosity, who were speaking with tim john. similarly, 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 john. tim, there are several issues that i'd like to raise with you 1st. 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 monitor and his monitor was, i choose the people who's on the defense team, lead lawyers, they run their defense team, i give them the tools and the jewelers, they get what they get. that unless they get 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 and 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 then i was actually dangerous to the team um, when the captain and i had a disagreement about whether i could talk to mr. bri 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. what's going on. i contacted the general for a meeting and if you contact me back with a number of e mails 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, mobbing that the general himself, it set up a legal hour and the captain had set up that with him the night before. 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 that day before the

meeting was supposed to take 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 that's the kind of guy. and in that the military commissions, because 2 years after i was released from harvey ridge, chicago, who is doing the reading a story, the man who the general reports to and then richard cop lieutenant colonel gary brown who was 2nd in charge. they were negotiating a, please deal with it with the defense teams to, to try to get these stall trials moving. and so they were trying to get a pre deal to take the death coffee off the table. and brown layer complained on n p r. he said that he and richard call were ambushed. they were called into 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 escorted out of the building. so an m p r brown was complaining of how they were treated. but when it happened to people like me or other people like us, because these 2 who were 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 of 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 said that i was like a logically unstable, and the other one says that i should be barred from ever being on a death penalty case. again, because i have some and 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. busy moyer and the captain after i left any one of the representatives, so because he couldn't trust them anymore. and then the transfer be says, i can't work with somebody, he would cheats me and causes me psychological harm. and so he wrote these letters to judge paul saying that the, the judge stating that the, the lawyers, the lawyers are putting lies about me and promotions. and he wanted to just know that he was making decisions based upon lice. but the judge wouldn't accept been passed his 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 if they're going to get fired. i'm going to do nothing, right. the motion is 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 want 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 of basic law principle. and he says to everyone that the ultimate loyalty of the court of the attorney is to the client, not to the other attorneys. and so he pointed independent counselor to help mister bin attached rights. most of the general den 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, 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 it to 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 scare. 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 half. and despite what senator baldwin and sen, kane are now doing, trying to get a resolution for an apology for the lavender here. they're only taking it up to 2011 to and the only thing is for government employees and for military personnel. my story, 2015. as a contractor that works with the government. my story show that the lavender scare

tactics are not extinguished. they are not extinguish with the passing of time. so i want to make sure that i'd say to these, to connect 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 on 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 bathroom selves into a corner to fire me. and now she's threatening me and she said exactly that. 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 from 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 in the world could 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 i have a dentist sergeant on the team who was 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 me

what they did. and i had the choice to make. if i fight this, i'm gonna, oh myself. further for do i let them do it and get away with it? and what i think about as all the security analysts, all the officers of the bottom 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 the report was only the small lowest level, the lowest ranking person on the team. and once i found out and i started asking more questions of other people than the people started feeling a little more church and they stepped up and they started providing problem writing 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 had to run now because 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 there and who are telling me the truth. so when i filed my complaint with a balance of, i wanted to say there's just, there weren't just 2 people involved. this went through the whole d o. d that went through, i was assured that and went to the office of inspector general of the d. o. d, i 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 d o 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 you letters of, of the many that i don't 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 deal with 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, patriot 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 summer lee 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 position i was suggesting, bob bel, great, was suggesting that we send americans and the bridges and dream

that on your bill is us, have been obama moved on. you probably now know about seeing what a strong one needs here. all the owners will say that it will save you from us so fast as you know the volume of the city. so what i need to file a past closeness, most of our thoughts in this one is not as a guide on a source or sit emotional around noon. it may be, you know, a lot less radioactive than that. something is active uranium, but still it's radioactive. and has toxins and the key killed the laptop. you want me to kind of see. so ease of us here. again, let's see the echo seats. the boeing good. i don't, you know, those usually demolish were suggesting we firm a cell great. the bill cause what they was,

the each the headlines right here. we're not the international as jo biden's on the nice in washington 90000000 bucks. pledge to his campaign fund is reportedly frozen. doesn't make a donors and corporate media back goes make us southern utah summer hunters and you'll see people, so 1414, what kind of intellectual process is behind these kind of a practical? yeah, just another gap from burrell that you use talk to different about christ filed and most school was out playing the blog in africa. joseph burrell calls for people on