Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [318]
The first reviews were favorable. “The regulations announced yesterday by the Pentagon incorporate the advice of outside experts and respond to important issues raised by legal and constitutional scholars,” the New York Times acknowledged on its editorial page. “When President Bush first issued the order establishing the tribunals last November, critics, this page included, were concerned about potentially secret trials, inadequate legal representation, verdicts based on flimsy evidence and death sentences imposed by divided panels. The regulations issued yesterday dispel many of these fears.”8 Bill Safire also wrote that he was “somewhat reassured by Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld’s ‘refinement’ of the hasty order.”9
I asked Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz to spearhead the effort to make the military commissions operable, but it took another year—until April 30, 2003—for lawyers to agree on the crimes that could be tried before military commissions. Everyone involved wanted to do things right—not fast—but President Bush and I found the lengthy delays disturbing. Whenever we expressed dismay at the excruciatingly slow pace, however, we were reminded by lawyers that we risked exerting “undue and improper command influence,” thereby corrupting the military commission process.
Despite the great care we took, some were uncomfortable with the military commissions system. It did not resemble the military’s courts-martial system with which military lawyers were familiar. Nor did it resemble the civilian courts with which most Americans were familiar. But the fact was the terrorists we were detaining were not American uniformed personnel to be tried under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Nor were they garden variety criminals to be tried in American civilian courts. The fact that the detainees were different was exactly the reason the military commissions were different. The lawyers of the captured al-Qaida suspects, along with various groups critical of the war in Afghanistan (and later in Iraq) and of President Bush, mounted volleys of attacks, even before the commission rules were completed. As a result, the commissions came under a broad and sustained assault in the courts, in the Congress, and in the press. Yet no preferable alternative has been established almost a decade later.
As Secretary of Defense, I found myself named in a number of lawsuits. Many were frivolous.* Others dealt with some of the thorniest issues in constitutional law and reached the Supreme Court of the United States.
One of those cases was decided on Thursday, June 29, 2006. I arrived at the Pentagon shortly After 6:30 that morning, as usual. In those quiet early hours, when the building’s hallways were not yet buzzing with the twenty-five thousand men and women who worked there daily, I could take some time to try to catch up on the mountain of work and reading materials that flowed through the office. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan, an ebullient leader with a flamboyant persona and a passion for all things Elvis Presley, was arriving in town for meetings with President Bush. I liked Koizumi, as did the President. At 9:00 a.m. Joyce met me at the White House for the arrival ceremony for the prime minister on the South Lawn. Afterward, I joined the President in the Oval Office for the two-hour meeting with Koizumi on a range of issues in one of America’s most important bilateral relationships.
Meanwhile, a block east of the Capitol building, TV cameras and reporters were gathering to receive the latest set of Supreme Court opinions. At 10:15 a.m., the court chambers fell silent as Justice John Paul Stevens began to read the holding in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.10 His opinion had split the court 5 to 3. The case, involving a Yemeni detainee at Guantánamo Bay named Salim Hamdan, had worked its way through federal district and appellate courts and had reached the Supreme