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Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a military intelligence officer, spent six months at the Department of Defense working in the office that reviews the government’s cases against detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

His experience — as recounted in a sworn affidavit — is credited with helping to persuade the Supreme Court to take a second look at the Bush administration’s war-on-terror powers.

On Thursday, he became the first military insider to urge Congress to scrap the military-run reviews conducted on the island and give detainees access to U.S. courts. He described the reviews, known as Combatant Status Review Tribunals, as “designed not to ascertain the truth, but to legitimize the detentions.”

“What we were handed were diluted, watered-down summaries, and it was the best they had,” Abraham, who participated in a detainee review as part of his assignment, told members of the House Armed Services committee. “We said it was not good enough to justify holding someone for the rest of their life. … It’s a game of spin the wheel.”