Part of the candidate blogger series for Obama

John Hutson served in the United States Navy for 28 years, achieving the rank of rear admiral and serving as its top lawyer, the Judge Advocate General, from 1997-2000.  After retiring from the Navy, Hutson became Dean and President of Franklin Pierce Law School in New Hampshire.  

Despite being a lifelong Republican and having voted for Bush, Hutson became increasingly outraged at the Bush administration's treatment of prisoners and signed a legal brief in March of 2004 in support of a case being brought by detainees before the Supreme Court.

U.S. forces have conducted status hearings in Iraq and during previous conflicts, Hutson said. By refusing to conduct them at Guantanamo Bay, the United States is setting bad legal precedents in a new kind of war, he said.  

"We fight wars to uphold the rule of law, but then we don't uphold the rule of law in our conduct of the war," he said. Until status hearings are held, the detainees must be treated as POWs, with the right to live in barracks together, cook their own food and be repatriated at the end of hostilities, he said.

In June of 2004, he appeared in this advertisement for the ACLU:

Since that time, Hutson has been a central figure in a group of retired high-level military officials advocating against the erosion of civil liberties under the Bush administration.  In January of 2006, he joined a group of 22 retired military officers in speaking out against the Bush administration's policy on torture.  He has testified before Congress on numerous occasions, most recently during the Mukasey confirmation hearings:

"The next Attorney General must be capable of recognizing a legal problem, step back from it and analyze it in the context of real life and understand the non-legal consequences of his advice," said Hutson in his testimony. "One might think, 'What a clever lawyer. He defined "torture" so narrowly and the defenses to torture so broadly that we can never be found guilty. He has done a great service to the Nation.' One would be dead wrong. We have seen the consequences of that sort of twisted legal analysis and we must never repeat it."

He also made this statement on waterboarding:

"Other than perhaps the rack and thumbscrews, waterboarding is the most iconic example of torture in history. It has been repudiated for centuries. It's a little bit disconcerting to hear now that we're not quite sure where waterboarding fits in the scheme of things."

Interestingly, Hutson, as a top level Navy lawyer in the 90's, was involved in the crafting of the compromise on gays and lesbians in the military known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." He is now an outspoken advocate of repealing the policy.

He has an interesting perspective, describing the 1994 compromise as a means of codifying what has always been the policy of the US Navy, but in a way that unleashed new problems.  Putting the policy into statue suddenly meant you had to discipline people when problems arose.

The 1994 argument that "unit cohesion" would be harmed by the presence of gays and lesbians is outdated, Hutson argues, and, in fact, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," by requiring gays and lesbians to hide their sexuality orientation has only had a detrimental affect on morale.

Video of an appearance on CNN:

This month, Huston, Dean and President of Franklin Pierce Law School and Co-Counsel of Human Rights First, changed his registration to Democrat in order to vote for Barack Obama in the New Hampshire primary.  He officially endorsed Obama this week, arguing that Obama is the one candidate who understands and can produce change on the issues he cares about.

Hutson had this to say about the moral crisis in this country on issues of imprisonment and interrogation:

We are running the risk of historians looking back on the first few years of the 21st century and saying "That's where American came off the rails, that's where we began to be the next former world power."