The Bush Administration Takes Down Another American Hero

By Cenk Uygur
Created Oct 11 2006 - 1:25pm

Lt. Commander Charles Swift is a JAG lawyer who recently won a Supreme Court
decision that upheld the values of the American justice system and
reaffirmed that we are a nation of laws. So, of course, he was fired [1].

In the case of the Navy, they call it "passed over for promotion." [2] It's
an "up or out" system. So, when he was denied promotion that meant Lt.
Commander Swift's career in the US military was over. He has to pack his
bags. After he is "retired" in March or April, he can no longer serve in the
United States Navy.

So, quietly, two weeks after he won the landmark ruling in the Hamdan case,
he was told he would be relieved of duty. Here's my favorite quote [3]:

"Charlie has obviously done an exceptional job, a really extraordinary
job," said Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan, the Pentagon's chief defense counsel
for Military Commissions.

Sullivan added it was "quite a coincidence" that Swift was passed over for
a promotion "within two weeks of the Supreme Court opinion."

Quite a coincidence? I don't know if he's kidding, but that is funny. The
price for doing the right thing in the Bush years is always high and always
career threatening. If you lie for them, you get the Presidential Medal of
Freedom (which has now disgracefully become a badge of shame [4] rather than
honor). If you stand up for what's right, you get crushed. And apparently no
one gives a damn.

Where's the uproar? Where was the uproar when General Eric Shinseki [5] and
Army Secretary Thomas White [6] were moved out of the Pentagon for having
the courage to tell Don Rumsfeld the truth about troop levels? Where was the
uproar when Bunnatine Greenhouse [7] was removed from her job [8] as chief
procurement officer for the Army Corps of Engineers when she complained that
Halliburton was unfairly receiving no-bid contracts and was getting away
with overcharging the US government? Where is the uproar now that we have
lost the service of yet another American hero?

Lt. Commander Swift was originally assigned to the case of Guantanamo
detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan to play the role of the patsy. He didn't quite
have the level of expertise that such a high-profile case would normally
require. He expressed considerable surprise [9] when he was selected for the
role. I am sure that back then it didn't even occur to him that they might
have picked him precisely because he didn't have much experience.

Then he was basically asked to throw the case [10]. Military prosecutors
strongly suggested that he arrange for a guilty plea. When Swift decided to
actually represent his client's interests, his superiors could not have been
pleased. They were looking for a couple of early guilty pleas to give Bush's
military tribunals an air of legitimacy that they sorely lacked. Who was Lt.
Commander Swift to stand up for the American and military justice system?
Who did he think he was asking for a fair trial?

Of course, it turned out Lt. Commander Swift was right. The Supreme Court
agreed with him that the trials were not fundamentally fair. They were
outside of our system of justice, outside of our laws and outside of our
values. America became the greatest country on earth by developing a system
of human rights, not by trampling on it. Everyone gets a fair trial, no
matter who they are. It isn't about them, it's about us.

It doesn't matter if it's Tim McVeigh or Salim Hamdan or Charles Manson or
Ramzi Yousef. The verdicts in the trials judge the defendants. The trials
themselves judge us. What are we made of? What do we believe in? Lt.
Commander Charles Swift understood this. Apparently his supervisors at the
Pentagon did not -- and to this day, even after having been scolded by the
Supreme Court of the United States of America -- still do not.

Lt. Commander Swift was an American hero because he stood up for real
American principles when it was not the popular thing to do and he had to
fight his own chain of command to do it. In the movies, he would walk into
the sunset as the audience applauded. In this grotesque world that the Bush
administration has created, he is walked out the back door with hardly a
peep. Another career buried, another man betrayed, another principle lost.
And the band plays on.

But we shall keep these names with us. We shall guard them closely. There
are men and women of courage among us. We will not forget. Their day will
come again, when America is great again.

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson