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The always-original The Talking Dog once again has an original interview HERE — this time with the lawyer of a prominent Gitmo detainee whose case may go before the Supreme Court. We’ll just give you the set up and a very small taste of the piece and you can read the whole thing yourself.
At some point in the next few weeks, the United States Supreme Court is expected to announce whether or not it will accept review of a case called Salim Hamdan v. Donald Rumsfeld, a case in which the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals held that Hamdan, a Yemeni national now detained at Guantanimo Bay Cuba, may not raise provisions of the Geneva Conventions on his own behalf, and may face military tribunals implemented by the President and the Department of Defense. On October 5, 2005, I had the privilege of “interviewing� Professor Neal Katyal of Georgetown University School of Law, the lead civilian attorney for Mr. Hamdan, by an e-mail exchange. The questions and answers follow.
The Talking Dog (who is a lawyer) asks great, specific questions of his interview subjects. But he always begins with a question about where they were on 911:
Neal Katyal: First of all, let me thank you for this opportunity to speak with you. I am just returning from India, and am quite jet lagged, so I hope what I say makes some sense.
To answer your first question, I was literally moving from Washington, DC, to New Haven, Connecticut, that day. My first child had been born in DC on August 22, 2001, and I didn’t get much sleep during the night of Sept. 10. My wife woke me up around 9am with the report of attack on the World Trade Center. The first words out of my mouth were “UBL.” I did national security work for the Justice Department, and was very familiar with his handiwork. I spent the next several months being upset that more had not been done to contain the threat.
So Katyal KNEW IT WAS bin Laden — due to his work in the government.
What follows are questions and answers about military tribunals, unlawful combatants, the potential physical impact of solitary confinement on Hamden and other prisoners, the possible impact of Chief Justice John Roberts — and various meaty issues surrounding them. Read the original for the details you will not want to miss.
One of the most compelling and news-timely threads running through out this is anything on the Geneva Convention, given the Senate’s action to overwhemlingly approve Senator John McCain’s amendment on torture.
Here’s an excerpt of what Katyal says on that:
Neal Katyal: Yes. In fact the 1949 Convention was written precisely to make it impossible for political actors to suspend the convention as they saw fit. As Jess Bravin has written for the Wall Street Journal, in World War II the Japanese Emperor suspended 1929 Geneva Convention Protections for our captured pilots, and we eventually prosecuted the Japanese prosecutors for war crimes for their actions. We did not want politicians, who are always tempted for understandable reasons to strip defendant’s protections, to be making these decisions. And the 1949 Convention, and in particular Article 85, was written to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision in Yamashita.
That is why it should come as no surprise that my greatest supporters in this lawsuit have always been the men and women of the American military. Senator Lindsey Graham recently released a series of memos. In them, our nation’s highest uniformed legal officers, the Judge Advocate Generals, explain the consequences of adopting these reckless interpretations of human rights treaties, which the Justice Department had claimed inapplicable to detainees. The first, and most important, thing they did was point out how our own troops lives would be put at risk by DOJ. As Marine General Kevin Sandkuhler put it, the Justice Department entity that drafted the policy “does not represent the services; thus, understandably, concern for servicemembers is not reflected in their opinion.”
The point here is simple: if America is seen as giving political actors like the President the ability to essentially suspend the Geneva Conventions through creative re-interpretation, there is nothing to stop other nations from doing the same to our troops when they are captured…
Read this content-heavy interview in full yourself. It should provide food for thought — and debate — for people on all sides.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.