If you accept the Vietnam-era proposition that military justice is to justice as military music is to music, I have a Web site for you. It’s where you can watch the kind of justice President Bush decreed for “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay being lambasted by lawyers in uniform–military officers defending the nation’s honor against George W. Bush’s White House.
Swift says, “My first real ethical question was, ‘Can I go down and participate in this at all?’ because I may be being used to force this man to plead guilty when he doesn’t think he’s guilty.” Swift decided to promise Hamdan that if he refused to plead guilty, giving Swift no further access to him, Swift would challenge Bush’s rules in the federal courts. “The only way my client would ever receive justice was to change the process,” Swift says. “If you couldn’t work in it, then you had to change it.”
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The teach-in was presided over by Seton Hall law professor Mark Denbeaux, who with his son Joshua, also a lawyer, earlier this year issued a study of 517 Guantanamo detainees. According to the study, based on the Department of Defense’s own data, only 5 percent of the detainees were captured by American forces, and 86 percent were handed over at a time when the U.S. was offering bounties for prisoners. And only 8 percent were characterized by the Defense Department as Al Qaeda fighters.
Sullivan, who was Swift’s supervisor at Guantanamo, shares his disdain for the rules they were expected to work under, saying, “There are many bad aspects of the Military Commissions Act, but one of the worst sides of it is the court-stripping provision that attempts to take away the right of habeas corpus.” Sullivan said that before the House voted on the act last month he told a congressman he knew, “This court-stripping provision is really a cure in search of a disease,” and the congressman said he’d heard that the detainees were given to filing frivolous motions.
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Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Defense Counsel via Getty Images (Hamdan ), Joshua Roberts/Getty Images (Swift).
