Metropolitan News-Enterprise

 

Friday, October 13, 2006

 

Page 3

 

Former JAG Officer Jon Holdaway Joins O’Brien Abeles

 

By a MetNews Staff Writer

 

Jon Holdaway, a former judge advocate who was involved in the Army’s response to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, has joined the Los Angeles firm O’Brien Abeles as an associate, the firm said.

Holdaway will concentrate on complex business disputes involving contracts, business torts, insurance coverage and criminal matters.

Holdaway received his undergraduate and law degrees from Brigham Young University. While in law school, he began his military career in the Utah Army National Guard as Military Intelligence Soldier, an interrogator.

Upon graduating in 1998, he became an active-duty Army JAG officer, where he started out helping soldiers, family members, and retirees with consumer credit problems, family law matters and disputes with the Army.

He then worked for a year as an administrative law attorney and in operational law, advising combatant commanders on legal issues involving military operations.

He later worked at the Trial Defense Service at Fort Sill, Oklahoma where he represented soldiers accused of crimes.

Holdaway could not be reached yesterday for comment. But his views on military legal work have appeared in the past on an Internet blog called Intel Dump.

“I learned in my two years there that most Soldiers who faced the military legal system were, at the core, good kids who made stupid choices,” Holdaway said on the blog. “Out of the many Soldiers I represented, I can count on maybe two hands the number of actually bad people I met.”

Holdaway spent his final three years with the Army as a senior legal advisor and intelligence oversight officer to the army’s primary military intelligence organizations in Europe, where he advised senior army officers on national security and intelligence collection laws and policies pertaining to detainee interrogations, counter-terrorism, signals intelligence activities and information operations and analysis.

His work at Abu-Ghraib is used today to train interrogators and their supervisors on the appropriate legal limits of interrogation operations, the firm said.

In 2005, after ending his JAG term, Holdaway began writing for Intel Dump, sharing his military expertise with readers, and joined the Woodland Hills firm Grassini & Wrinkle.

O’Brien Abeles is a boutique firm that focuses on litigation for clients in the business, entertainment and insurance communities. Its clients have included Home Box Office, Warner Music Group, Time, Inc., Oxygen Media, Taco Bell Corp., Culligan International, Novell, Meade Instruments and former astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

 

Copyright 2006, Metropolitan News Company