"Quite a coincidence"
Now comes word that the Navy lawyer who took the habeus corpus petition of Osama bin Laden's former driver, Salim Hamdan, to the U.S. Supreme Court and won has been denied promotion by a Navy board and must, under Navy rules, retire from the service. Or to paraphrase: Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift has been thrown out on his ass for embarassing the Bush Administration.
His immediate superior called it "quite a coincidence" that the decision to deny promotion to Swift--recently picked by the National Law Journal as one of the country's top 100 lawyers--came two weeks after the Supreme Court ruled that President George W. Bush had violated the Constitution six ways to Sunday in establishing military tribunals with new and creative procedures and rules of evidence to fry, er, try suspected terrorists at Guantanamo.
I would guess that the Bush regime's move against Swift will cause consternation in the military justice system. Military lawyers take their jobs quite seriously and pointed with pride--in the past--to rules intended to prevent so-called "command influence" in military justice proceedings. While throwing Swift out on the street may not technically violate those rules, all military lawyers now know the price for aggressively defending someone the Commander in Chief wants locked up for life.