So it would be helpful to remember what Antony said when he arrived in Egypt:

His focus on doing the best job he could do at what he wanted to do was likely one of the reasons he was able to win Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. In fact, Swift might be the perfect guy to prosecute Rumsfeld, Bush et al for war crimes, should the opportunity ever arise.

"He's doing a fantastic job," said Swift's current boss at the Office of Military Commissions (tribunals), Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan.
...
"We all take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and he has certainly done that, literally."

Swift's first supervisor at the Office of Commissions was Col. Will Gunn, who said Friday that he gave Swift two annual fitness reports and "I gave him very high ratings overall."

Asked whether he thought politics might have played a role in Swift being bypassed for promotion, Gunn focused on Swift's atypical career as a military lawyer. "Charlie has spent a lot of time as a litigator, a trial advocate. That's really unusual in the JAG. You find that people in the more senior ranks have moved around and proved themselves in a variety of settings."

Most of Swift's career has been spent in the courtroom.

"While Charlie is a brilliant guy, a tenacious litigator, he does not have all the blocks checked like some other folks have," Gunn said. He called it a "breadth-of-experience" issue.

Swift clearly believes that his vigorous defense of Hamdan was, in a very real way, a vigorous defense of military justice and the Constitution.

"If they are calling the commissions (tribunals) military justice, it's got to live up to what military justice is. It means something. It's about the law, not what the leaders want. The greatest thing about the JAG Corps is ... I had the opportunity to work every day in a system I believe in."

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As a former officer in the military, I understand the process in applying for promotion. You are competing against a large pool of officers and there are limited positions available. If the officer decides not to attend Command and General Staff School, he has accepted the fact that he will not get promoted. Many professionals do that as they look forward to a civilian career.

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These values have been debased under the tenure of the neocons and their useful idiot.

No one has a beef with the soldier. He does a great job bravely. It's the cretins who are willing to water down and obfuscate the issues of detainee rights in the name of "security" who are as much a threat as the new terrorists Bush and Co. have made.

The issue has nothing, nada, to do with wanting to "treat non-citizens like we treat citizens". But it's useful for some to confuse the issues this way, very Bush-like--simple, simplistic, and imaginary. Appeals to the base.

You have a wireless laptop in the middle of the road  just outside the Green Zone now, do you?

  First,  that assumes "we" are a monolith and all shared either false assumptions or  had no assumptions. I do not believe that to be the case. Second, it fails to put forth a single fact that was not understood.

  As you might anticipate, it is impossible to identify things "we" didn't understand without necessarily acknowledging that some of the "we" did understand. You can't call one part of "we" wrong without calling some other part of "we" right.

    Personally, i think both the neo-cons and hardcore anti-war (meaning war generally not Iraq)  movement understand quite well and I think both present false views that very few people in between see as anything other than propagabda.

   I also think that both sides of the false propaganda divide base their propaganda on a similar "lie."

   The neo-cons "lie"  about the possibility of establishing a peaceful ME and Central Asia  through a projection of our military, economic, cultural and political might and establishing "democratic" power structures based in large part on "our" model. But, the "peace through understanding" advocates similarly "lie" about the possibility of the establishment of a peaceful ME and Central Asia through our understanding and allowing indigenous  power structures  to develop based on "their" model.

   I'd agree that releasing "enemy combatants" during a state of war without consideration from the "enemy" is poor policy.  It begs the question though of who is actually an "enemy combatant" and who and through what processes should determine whether one is an "enemy combatant."

Keep your pity, it is not wrong to perceive that America has been raped, pillaged, and had its legal system, which served us well for over 200-years, turned completely upside down by bush's assumption of so-called "plenary powers of the unitary executive", which is naught but a fancy way of saying the Decider decides who lives or dies, who gets a trial or not, who gets kidnapped or not, who gets rendered to another country for torturing or not, who gets tortured at all, and whether American courts can continue to dispense justice or fall prey to vigilantism by bush and his merry band of neocon criminals.

So, yes, I mean every word, and the "life events" making me able to recognize this is a life dedicated to law enforcement and protecting the rights of everyday American citizens who, formerly, had a justice system adjudged to be among the best in the world; not the best or perfect system, but at least one that accorded certain "unalienable" rights to every criminal defendant or anyone held in U.S. custody.

Now we refuse to even acknowledge human rights on a basic level and "American Justice" is the laughingstock and sick joke of the world.

Even imperial Rome never sought the death of each and every member of a nation they conquered.

Actually not true of the Romans or the Greeks.

But it took Moslems to really polish and execute the policy.

Read some history, Bill.

Heck read some current news:"

Somali Muslims who fail to perform daily prayers will be killed in accordance with Qur'anic law under a new edict issued by a leading cleric in the Islamic courts union that controls Mogadishu.

The Islamic Republic of Sudan turns up the heat on African children. Four were forced into a hut and burned to death last week.

You obviously disagree with me and I disagree with you, but this relentless slide of yours into personal attacks, accusations you cannot possibly back-up, and ever more wild -I hesitate to say demented - assertions to know what is in the mind and hearts of men, especially me,  while disregarding the plain language with which people state their opinions, bespeaks an intemperate nature and level of willful ignorance that astounds me and serves you ill.

I leave it to the TL community-at-large to adjudge your words and your hostile, inimical-to-reasoned-debate words and opinions; I will no longer rate your opinions lest it appear that I bear some personal animus towards you, as you demonstrate towards me.

I will therefore elect to henceforth exclude consideration of a response to the nonsensical and personal attacks you have chosen to pursue against me. I would say that we have to agree to disagree, but I know you would be disagreeable about that as well.

"The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others --- the living --- are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of motorcyles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions."
-- Hunter S. Thompson

He thought, and wrote, and taught, and lived, and died, on his own terms. A true and honest man.

And he once said he would have liked to tie Nixon to his car bumper, drag him around the WH a few times, then cut him loose and dump him in front of the Rose Garden.