Lawyer talks politics of terrorism

Last night the University of Pittsburgh hosted a lecture by Professor Charles Swift, a former… Last night the University of Pittsburgh hosted a lecture by Professor Charles Swift, a former attorney for the U.S. Department of Defense who, in 2006, served as defense counsel in the well-publicized Supreme Court case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.

The plaintiff in the case was Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni man who served as personal driver for Osama Bin Laden prior to the events of Sept. 11.

During the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Hamdan was captured by Afghan military forces, transferred to U.S. custody and detained in Guantanamo Bay, where he remains today.

Swift lectured in the Teplitz Moot Courtroom of the Barco Law Building and centered his discussion on the application of international law in the War on Terror, especially in relation to the Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.

The court ruled that the military commission ordered by the Bush administration to prosecute Hamdan violated both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and should therefore be discontinued.

Throughout the lecture, Swift remained adamant about respecting the tenets of international law in a time of armed conflict.

“The fact that your enemy is not a nation-state doesn’t give you the right to commit war crimes,” he said.

He humorously recounted the first days of his involvement with Hamdan. While in Washington, a fellow attorney asked him to “take a short detour down to Guantanomo Bay” to represent Hamdan in a speedy military court commission.

He has now represented Hamdan for almost six years.

Military commissions are tribunals without a jury that are ordered by the president to prosecute “enemy combatants.”

Swift then talked at length about how the nature of the military commission violated well-established international law codes such as Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

The article states that “in the case of an armed conflict not of an international character [such as the war on terror],” a prisoner of the conflict must be tried by a court affording all judicial rights recognized by civilized peoples.

Since Swift’s legal team argued that the U.S. Defense Department violated this article by prosecuting Hamdan without a jury and pressuring him to plead guilty, the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan’s favor.

Swift said that the decision in the case “is an extraordinary victory in human rights,” but he admitted it still shows some limits in the amount of rights extended to enemy combatants.

In response to the court’s decision, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which declares the right of self-representation for enemy combatants but still permits the use of coerced testimony and doesn’t give the right to a speedy trial.