Charles Swift for Supreme Court Justice

(Thanks to Blue Girl for reminding me about the Constitution-saving service performed by the JAG lawyers who defended Guantanamo detainees.)

You want to know what really makes a potential Supreme Court nominee tick? What he or she will do when presented with an impossible situation? Whether he or she will put the Constitution, the Rule of Law and the good of the nation above personal, political and pecuniary considerations? Read this 2007 Vanity Fair profile of Navy Commander Charles Swift, who beat the Forces of Darkness at - and within - the Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the case that restored the primacy of the 800-year-old Great Writ of habeas corpus.

Assigned to defend a Guantánamo detainee, jag lawyer Charles Swift joined up with legal scholar Neal Katyal and sued the president and secretary of defense over the new military-tribunal system. With their 2006 Supreme Court victory overridden by the Republican Congress, and Swift's navy career at an end, they are fighting on.

The whole purpose of setting up Guantánamo Bay is for torture. Why do this? Because you want to escape the rule of law. There is only one thing that you want to escape the rule of law to do, and that is to question people coercively—what some people call torture. Guantánamo and the military commissions are implements for breaking the law. Why build a prison here when there are plenty of prisons in Nebraska? Why is it, when we see photos of Abu Ghraib, we think that it is "exporting Guantánamo"? That it is the "Guantánamo method"? —Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift to the author, January 2007.

SNIP

October 15, 2006. The day I meet Charlie Swift, he attempts to sum up the legal morass of Guantánamo. "Justice," he says, "is based on a simple idea: it can happen to you." The line comes out minutes after he arrives at a Starbucks in the suburbs of Maryland, and the intensity of his delivery causes the teenagers making out at the next table to look up. It's a Sunday afternoon, shortly after the announcement that Swift is leaving the navy. A few days earlier, on October 11, The New York Times ran a harsh editorial commenting on the subject:

In 2003, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift was assigned to represent Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni citizen accused of being a high-ranking member of Al Qaeda—for the sole purpose of getting him to plead guilty before one of the military commissions that President Bush created for the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Instead of carrying out this morally repugnant task, Commander Swift concluded that the commissions were unconstitutional. He did his duty and defended his client.… The Navy gave no reason for denying Commander Swift's promotion. But there is no denying the chilling message it sends to remaining military lawyers about the potential consequences of taking their job, and justice, seriously.

The Times editorial made it seem as if a navy hero had been slapped down for trying to put a stop to the practices at Guantánamo. On the telephone, Swift was irritated about that. "There is nothing clear-cut about this," he insisted. "It is not black-and-white."

SNIP

The victory, however, was short-lived. On October 17, President Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, creating a new system of interrogating and prosecuting terrorism suspects and denying the 430 prisoners at Guantánamo and others around the world the right to file writs of habeas corpus. "The constitutional issue could not be more stark," Swift declared. "What they are doing is unprecedented."

SNIP

March 28, 2006. At three A.M. the night before they were to argue in front of the Supreme Court, Swift was on the courthouse steps in jeans. For days, protesters had been massing in the capital, and students had lined up on the steps for the night, hoping to be let into the trial the next day. A group of high-school students from Wisconsin began to talk with Swift. "Did Mr. Hamdan do it?" one of them asked him.

Swift recalls, "I told them, 'The question tomorrow is not: Did Mr. Hamdan do it? It is: Who are we? What kind of people are we? That is why it is so important that you are here today, because someday you will be able to tell your children who we are as a nation.… And something else: only in this country can a military officer take a disagreement with presidential power to court as a way of settling. Everywhere else they call that a coup.'"

And that's what I call a genuine American patriot who is uniquely qualified to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.