Diane E. Beaver is an American lawyer and former officer in the United States Army.[1]
In 2001, she was Chief of the Eastern U.S. Torts Branch of the U.S. Army Claims Service.[2]
By 2002, she was deployed to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp as a lawyer in the U.S. military prison complex there.
As of 2016, she is currently practicing commercial litigation for the Bryan Cave law firm in St. Louis, Missouri.[3]
Guantánamo experience
Department of Defense memorandum with the subject "Legal Review of Aggressive Interrogation Techniques", signed by Beaver.
In October 2002, when Beaver worked for the United States Army Judge Advocate General's Corps, she drafted a legal opinion advocating for the legality of harsh interrogation techniques that were being proposed for use at Guantanamo, including[4][5][6]
"scenarios designed to convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequences are imminent for him and/or his family."
She also advised that Category II and III methods (the harshest) "undergo a legal review prior to their commencement".[4]
In a meeting in October 2002, Beaver warned her fellow officers to make sure that observers from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) not observe the use of the "harsher" interrogation techniques.
The JTF "might need to curb the harsher operations while [ICRC] is around". It would be "better not to expose them to any controversial techniques. . . They will be in and out, scrutinizing our operations, unless they are displeased and decide to protest and leave. This would draw a lot of negative attention."[7]
Beaver testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on June 17, 2008.[8]
The final paragraph of the written statement she submitted to the committee read:
If my legal opinion was wrong, then I regret the error very much. I am a proud professional. I feel very keenly any failure on my part to be precise and accurate in the advice I render. I freely accept sincere dissent and criticism. But there is something very important I will never have to regret. At a time of great stress and danger, I tried to do everything in my lawful power to protect the American people.
^"The Guantanamo Trap". CBC News. 2011-04-29. Archived from the original on 2013-08-18. Retrieved 2023-08-01. We started this segment with a clip from Diane Beaver, now a retired lawyer who was a Lt. Col. and legal advisor in the U.S. Army's Judge Advocate General Corps. And she's speaking about the prisoners she saw while working at the U.S. Military Prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and the dark days after 9/11 and the pressure she and others say they felt to get those prisoners to talk.
^"The Guantanamo Trap". Four Corners. 2011-08-01. Archived from the original on 2011-11-24. Retrieved 2023-08-01. The second person in this story is Diane Beaver, a Judge Advocate for the US Defence Forces. Deployed to Guantanamo she is responsible for drafting a legal memorandum that would later be nicknamed the 'torture memo'. Beaver, a self confessed conservative, supports the war on terror and simply tries to follow orders creating a document that defines what interrogators can and cannot legally do to inmates.
^"The Guantanamo Trap". Encounters magazine. 2011-06-26. Archived from the original on 2011-09-30. Retrieved 2011-11-18. Judge Advocate Diane Beaver volunteers for Guantanamo and becomes the international press's 'torture lady'.
^"HotDocs 2011: The Guantanamo Trap". Hot Docs. 2011-05-23. Archived from the original on 2011-11-07. Retrieved 2011-11-18. Not that you need to be completely even-handed when discussing torture, but it's quite fascinating to hear Diane Beaver (appointed legal advisor to the camp command at Guantanamo in early 2002) talk about why she wrote that initial memo and why she does not believe that any of those techniques bordered on torture (by what she terms as "any definition" of the word you'd care to name). The film itself is quite careful to never explicitly state that any of these methods are actually torture, but it's hard to escape that conclusion when you hear people who have experienced it talk to the camera about it.
^
Silverberg, David (2011-05-12). "Op-Ed: The Guantanamo Trap a powerful intelligent documentary on torture". Digital Journal. Archived from the original on 2011-07-21. Retrieved 2023-08-01. What elicited the most reaction during the film was the story of Diane Beaver, someone consistently linked with torture if you Google her name. Also a Judge Advocate for the U.S. military, she is best known as the author of a legal memorandum that would later be nicknamed, 'The Torture Memo.' That act has forever shadowed her, even though she never regrets listing the many new ways prisoners can be interrogated at Gitmo, which Donald Rumsfeld approved. Consider Beaver responsible for tactics such as stripping prisoners naked and exposing them to phobias such as barking dogs.
Lederman, Marty (June 14, 2005). "GTMO: Where Was the Law? Whither the UCMJ?". Jack Balkin's Balkinization Blog. Archived from the original on 2023-05-16. Retrieved 2023-08-01. Well, then, if some of the proposed techniques are acknowledged to be "per se" federal crimes, how is it that Beaver can then recommend their use and (in a cover memo) conclude that they "do not violate applicable federal law"? Here's the only clue: She writes that because of the "per se" prohibitions of the UCMJ, "[i]t would be advisable to have permission or immunity in advance from the convening authority, for military members utilizing these methods." No explanation here of the legal theory pursuant to which such ex ante "permission or immunity" to violate the law could be conferred.
