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"That's not whistle-blowing you hear," General Hemingway said. "It's a whine."
In his contentious days at Guantánamo, lawyers who battled him said, Colonel Davis was known for a you're-with-us-or-you're-against-us style of news-conference warfare, delivered in an amiable North Carolina twang.
He is an experienced military lawyer, with years of work both in the prosecution and the defense. He is the son of a disabled veteran of World War II, and he is married with one daughter.
In interviews this week he was in his combative mode, challenging Pentagon officials to take lie-detector tests and asserting that commanders had praised him in the past.
He portrayed himself as battling political appointees. But he said he still believed that a military commission system could work. "It's gotten so tarnished that if we're going to convince the world that this isn't some rigged process we have to bend over backwards," he said. He said the solutions were simple - giving control to military officials. But he suggested darkly that there are "people at key points in the process, that I just don't know what their allegiance is."
There is little question that Colonel Davis's unusual path began with some angry exchanges with General Hartmann last summer.
When the colonel resigned as chief military prosecutor, officials disclosed that he had filed a formal complaint asserting that General Hartmann improperly pressed for more war crimes cases and demanded "sexy" cases that would excite the public. An internal report sided with General Hartmann but suggested that he should avoid too much influence over the military prosecutors.
From there, after being reassigned by the Air Force, Colonel Davis found an audience for his accusations.
He told one newspaper that top defense officials discussed the "strategic political value" of putting prominent detainees on trial before the 2008 presidential election. He told another that he had been pressed to hold hearings in closed courtrooms. He wrote op-ed pieces saying General Hartmann had reversed his policy of refusing to use evidence derived through torture.
He told The Nation that the general counsel of the Pentagon, William J. Haynes II, informed him "we can't have acquittals" at Guantánamo.
In a statement Wednesday a Pentagon official would say only, "We disagree with the assertions made by Colonel Davis."
Some detainees' lawyers say they recognize a pattern in Colonel Davis's approach. He once wrote an article in an Air Force journal offering advice to military leaders on how to handle the media. "Take the offensive," it said.
Muneer I. Ahmad, a law professor at American University who fought Colonel Davis in a detainee's case at Guantánamo, said he recognized the strategy in the attacks on Pentagon officials. "It's his way of trying to reshape what the story is," Professor Ahmad said.
If it is, Colonel Davis hinted he is not satisfied yet. "I'm hoping at some point to retire, so I can say what I really think," he said.
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