- Jawad was a 16 year old Afghan. What he was alleged to have done was throw a grenade into the back of a vehicle driven by a special forces soldier with another special forces soldier's passenger, and their Afghan interpreter, and he'd badly wounded them and had immediately been apprehended by the Afghan police and confessed. The perfect case to vindicate the commissions process. The military commissions act of 2006 and show America and the world that we were doing the right thing. But I made it a point because I sitting across from Jawad to glare at him, I was gonna to stare him down. Here's this kid, you know, and at the time I was 45 or whatever, you know. I look back at my behavior and I just am astonished that I could have been so brazen, so self-righteous and full of myself. And then something that has had a very dramatic impact on my life happened. And that is that a man named David Frakt, an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel reservist was assigned to the case. And I began to see that the arguments that he was making appealed to our highest aspirations not to be melodramatic about it but to what is right in an ethical sense. I began to re-examine my own basic beliefs. And I saw myself evolving. I became like someone who had been wearing a mask and suddenly I took it off. and there staring me in the mirror was not Darrel Vandeveld, this hard-charging soldier who was going to single-handedly win the war on terrorism. But somebody possessed of humanity who could extend that humanity to, yeah. Even someone who is an enemy, a dirty little terrorist from a dirty little crappy foreign land, you know, land that's a pile of rocks. I began to re-examine all the cases that I was handling. And I began more than that to re-examine what we're doing as a country with Guantanamo.