Obama appoints Mark Martins Deputy Commander of the New "Indefinite Detention" policy:

"One of Barack Obama’s first acts when he took office as President was to sign Executive Order 13493. The key activity of this EO was:

There shall be established a Special Task Force on Detainee Disposition (Special Task Force) to identify lawful options for the disposition of individuals captured or apprehended in connection with armed conflicts and counterterrorism operations.
The composition of the task force was to include the highest level individuals mostly from military and security posts: Attorney General (Co-Chair), Secretary of Defense (Co-Chair), Secretary of State, Secretary of Homeland Security, Director of National Intelligence, Director of Central Intelligence, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Farther down in the instructions, we find that the “Co-Chairs shall jointly select an officer or employee of the Department of Justice or Department of Defense to serve as the Executive Secretary of the Special Task Force”. From this structure, it would appear that the Executive Secretary would be the person to wield the most power in putting together the policies to be put forward by the Special Task Force.

The person chosen as Executive Secretary for this Special Task Force was Brigadier General Mark S. Martins. The linked biography of Martins shows a career marked by a rapid rise through a legal system that has been at the heart of many spectacular cases in the sordid history of US prisoner treatment in Iraq and Afghanistan. I encourage comparison of the dates and assignments with Emptywheel’s Torture Timeline and with the events in the prosecution of David Passaro (yes, this is ostensibly a CIA case, but JSOC personnel certainly were around the periphery, so Martins had to be aware of the process leading to charges for Passaro and not JSOC personnel for this case or for the earlier Salt Pit murder) to see how Martins keeps turning up in offices that seem to be handling the cases where US behavior is at its worst.

Of special note, of course, is that Martins now is Deputy Commander (the biography appears to be in error with “Interim Commander”; all other references I’ve found put him at Deputy to Vice Admiral Harward) of Joint Task Force 435, which is in charge of all prisoner operations in Afghanistan. The bottom line, then, is that Martins was key in crafting prisoner policy and now has been sent to Afghanistan to carry it out.
Martins has clearly been “flying under the radar”, as press references to him are relatively few. In fact, he seems to have somehow impressed reporter Gareth Porter, who has this to say about Martins’ current assignment:

Harward and other present and past JSOC officials, including Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who was then overall commander of JSOC, have an obvious interest in ensuring that the results of case reviews do not reflect negatively on JSOC’s detention decisions.
Putting an officer with such an obvious conflict of interest in charge of the Task Force – and assigning Martins, a lawyer who is clearly more sympathetic to detainee rights, as his deputy – has all the earmarks of a Pentagon compromise.

snip

http://firedoglake.com/

that is NOT change.