Last year, U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz was convicted of unlawfully disclosing classified information to an unauthorized person, after he provided the names of prisoners secretly held in military detention at Guantanamo Bay to a civil rights organization. He was sentenced to six months in prison and ordered discharged from the Navy.
Last week, Diaz was honored as a “truth teller” at the National Press Club in Washington, DC for the very same action.
He received the Ridenhour Award, named for the late Ron Ridenhour, who revealed the 1968 massacre of Vietnamese at My Lai.
“Lt. Cmdr. Diaz demonstrated independent judgment, fidelity to the Constitution, and uncommon courage,” according to the Ridenhour Award statement. “By disclosing the names of prisoners secretly detained at Guantanamo, he broke ranks and he violated the law, and for that he has paid a serious price. But we believe that he also demonstrated a profound loyalty to the United States and its enduring constitutional principles.”
The April 3 remarks of Matthew Diaz upon receiving the Ridenhour Award may be found here.
The award ceremony and some of the background to it were described by Joe Conason in “A Truth Teller Who Deserves Justice,” Salon.com, April 4.
A longer treatment of the Diaz case appeared in “Naming Names at Gitmo” by Tim Golden, New York Times Magazine, October 21, 2007.
Remarkably, Diaz appears to be the first American ever convicted under the espionage statutes for disclosing classified information to another American rather than to a foreign person or government, according to a new study of espionage in America.
From grassroots community impacts to global geopolitical dynamics, understanding developing data center capacities is emerging as a critical analytical challenge.
Over the past few months, the Trump administration has been laying the foundation to expand the use of the Defense Production Act (DPA) for energy infrastructure and supply chains.
Get it right, and pooled hiring becomes a model for how the federal government decides what to do together and what to do apart. That’s a bigger prize than faster hiring. It’s a more functional government.
As of March 2026, there were at least nine documented U.S. wrongful arrests tied to face recognition misidentification. Errors like these are as much human as machine.