The ACLU today accused the Congressional Research Service of firing Col. Morris Davis from his job as the assistant director of its Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division because his boss didn't like his opinions about recent developments at Guantanamo.

In a press release you can read here, the ACLU accuses the CRS of violating Davis's free speech rights. According to the ACLU, Davis was fired after he wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal and had a letter to the editor published in the Washington Post. Both were published on Nov. 11.

In the first, Davis took Attorney General Eric Holder to task for citing different ways of treating evidence as one reason the 9/11 plotters would be given civilian trials while some other Guantanamo detainees would undergo military commissions. In the other, he slammed former Attorney General Michael Mukasey for saying in the Washington Post that civilian federal courts weren't capable of handling terrorist prosecutions.

The reaction, says the ACLU, was immediate. Davis's boss sent him an e-mail and then, after several meetings, fired him, citing the publications.

Davis is no neophyte when it comes to Guantanamo controversy. He resigned as the Pentagon's chief prosecutor in 2007, saying the military commission process had little to do with the search for justice, then famously testified as a witness for the DEFENSE in the trial of bin Laden's alleged driver, Salim Hamdan, saying politics, not justice, seemed to be behind a rush to prosecutions. The goal: Get the trials started so whoever succeeded George Bush couldn't ever stop them.

"There was that constant theme that if we don't get this thing rolling before the election, it's going to implode," he said. "Once you get the victim families energized and the cases rolling, whoever took the White House would have difficulty stopping the process."

No word from the CRS, part of the sprawling Library of Congress. You'll remember last month, Sen. John Kerry and Rep. Howard Berman asked the library's law branch to withdraw an opinion about the law behind the political crisis in Honduras. The library refused, though the Library's opinion in that case does have an odd leap of logic.

Davis is only the latest government official who's been critical of Guantanamo and is now out on his ear. This Time account of White House counsel Greg Craig's departure paints a picture of an Obama administration all too willing to fade on Guantanamo issues. And shortly after Craig left, Phil Carter, the Pentagon official responsible for seeing that Guantanamo gets closed, also was gone. Carter, an Iraq war veteran, had been an outspoken critic of Bush detention policy, which is what earned him his job. He still hasn't said publicly what pushed him to leave last week.