Lawrence Morris

Attorney Lawrence J. Morris is the chief of staff and counselor to the president at The Catholic University of America and a retired United States Army colonel.

Academic career

Morris graduated from Marquette University's law school in 1982. Morris had previously earned a double major at Marquette in Political Science and Journalism.

In 1997 Lieutenant Colonel Morris served as the head of the Criminal Law department of the U.S. Army The Judge Advocate General's Legal Center and School, which has full American Bar Association accreditation for its post-juris-doctoral graduate course that confers a Master of Laws degree (or LLM) to its graduates. Like nearly all of his peers who are field grade Army officers on active duty as a judge advocate, Col. Morris holds an LLM in Military Law awarded by the Judge Advocate General's Legal Center and School on the campus of the University of Virginia.

Morris also studied at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, where he earned a Master of Science in National Security Strategy.

In 2002, Morris was the head of the Army's criminal law branch and was tasked with planning the first prosecution of suspected 9/11 terrorists. According to the Wall Street Journal, back in 2002 "he proposed a high-profile public trial that would lay bare the scope of al Qaeda's alleged conspiracy while burnishing the ideals of American justice." His legal advice was disregarded by the Bush administration, which decided to interrogate terrorists in secret—perhaps to gain critical intelligence necessary—to prevent further attacks, rather than seek justice through high-profile trials. Morris was later asked to conduct the trials.

Comments on the testimony of the witness known as "OC-1"

The Toronto Star identified Morris as the Chief Prosecutor of the Guantanamo military commissions. The Bush administration acknowledged subjecting Al Qahtani to 58 days of sleep deprivation and other extreme interrogation methods in the fall of 2002, when intelligence officials realized he had tried to travel to the United States in the months preceding al Qaeda's September 11 attacks. Morris's prosecution team had proposed charges against Al Qahtani to Susan Crawford in early 2008. Crawford, the convening authority of military commissions, has the final say over whether charges are confirmed. She dropped the charges against al Qahtani because his "treatment met the legal definition of torture".

During his only testimony that has been made public—his testimony before his 2006 Administrative Review Board hearing—Al Qahtani acknowledged confessing to extensive ties to al Qaeda, and the 9-11 hijacking plot, but he claimed all his confessions were from the two months he was being tortured, and he had recanted them at every opportunity since then.

When announcing the new charges, Morris stated that the new charges were based on "independent and reliable evidence". After military retirement, Morris worked as a civilian attorney for the U.S. Army. He wrote an article for the United States Army Combined Arms Center's periodical Military Review in 2012: "An Asset Out of You and Me: Communicating What It Truly Means to be a Soldier."

Catholic University of America

In 2011, Catholic University of America president John H. Garvey appointed Morris as the school's general counsel. On 1 January 2018, he was appointed chief of staff and counselor to the president of the university, and was succeeded as general counsel by Nancy Morrison, a professor at Notre Dame Law School.