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Mike: I'm Mike Pheneger. I am a retired Army colonel. I spent 30 years on active duty doing
intelligence work for the United States Army. I'm a former deputy director of intelligence
for US Central command, which does Middle Eastern operations and I was the first director
of intelligence for the US special operations command, which does all the special operations
work worldwide. The oath that an Army officer swears, that
all officers of the government swear to, is to support and defend the Constitution of
the United States. We don't swear allegiance to a particular administration. We swear allegiance
to a principle, the principle of the rule of law, the protections in the Bill of Rights,
providing people due process. It's always been a system that's worked pretty
well for us. It's worked well in previous terrorist incidents. It's worked well in many
other occasions, and there's no real reason why it can't work well now, except that the
administration has rather arbitrarily decided not to use it. Well, the Uniform Code of Military
Justice is literal, a law code. It's passed by the Congress of the United States, and
it applies to the serving military. It also has provisions within the UCMJ for military
commissions. The provisions basically provide that it observes the US rule of law. It's
compatible with the requirements of the Geneva Convention.
Part of the problem that the Supreme Court initially found with military commissions,
of course, is that the president had no authority to set them up and they violated the provisions
that were already established in law under the UCMJ. I think that was a terrible decision
on the part of the administration to basically throw out a system that was time tested over
a long period of time and to try to come up with some new jerry-rigged system that basically
violates basic constitutional precepts. These people are accused of committing horrendous
crimes. It becomes very important from the standpoint of the perception of people in
the United States and more important, even, from the perception of the people in foreign
countries, and even from the perception of our enemies, that these people are actually
being tried and handled in accordance with the American system of justice; that they're
afforded due process of law, that they're not basically convicted, they say, "Well,
on their own testimony obtained from themselves or from other people through torture; that
they're not convicted on the basis of hearsay evidence."
It's very important from the standpoint of our national security, frankly, that we get
this right the first t is ime. If the president and the administration are not going to get
it right, then I'm very happy that the ACLU is becoming involved to try to make sure that
the system works in such a way that it will have credibility internationally.