Free Republic

The Navy lawyer who led a successful Supreme Court challenge of the Bush administration's military tribunals for detainees at Guantanamo Bay has been passed over for promotion and will have to leave the military, The Miami Herald reported Sunday. Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, 44, will retire in March or April under the military's "up or out" promotion system. Swift said last week he was notified he would not be promoted to commander. He said the notification came about two weeks after the Supreme Court sided with him and against the White House in the case involving Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a...

I watched The African Queen, again this week. That classic movie, starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn, offered a clear explanation of several current news events this week. What is the lesson of The African Queen? It is this: Understand your circumstances, and set your goal based on that. In that movie, the goal was to sink the German warship, The Louisa. And that goal dictated the tactics which had to be taken, regardless of danger or odds against them, to reach that goal. As a reminder of that fine movie, the tactics were for Charlie Allnut and Rose Sayers...

Because the Hamdan case was not up on my favorite research site at Cornell Law School early this morning, I read the press coverage first and the decisions afterward. The press has only a superficial understanding of the case, and missed the most important aspect of the decision. The case is Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, No. No. 05–184, June 29, 2006. Source: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/05-184.ZS.html The Christian Science Monitor gets the facial decision correctly: The court ruled 5-to-3 Thursday that Mr. Bush acted outside his authority when he ordered Al Qaeda suspects to stand trial before these specially organized military commissions. The ruling...