Major Andrew Olmsted, a longtime blogger and Army Reservist, was killed in action yesterday when his unit was ambushed.

His Obsidian Wings colleague Hilzoy had the sad honor of posting his final blog missive. Her lead-in:

Andrew Olmsted, who also posted here as G’Kar, was killed yesterday in Iraq. Andy gave me a post to publish in the event of his death; the last revisions to it were made in July.

Andy was a wonderful person: decent, honorable, generous, principled, courageous, sweet, and very funny. The world has a horrible hole in it that nothing can fill. I’m glad Andy — generous as always — wrote something for me to publish now, since I have no words at all. Beyond: Andy, I will miss you.

My thoughts are with his wife, his parents, and his brother and sister.

As are mine and those of others he touched through his writing.

I never met Andy in person, although we corresponded a bit through emails and cross-blog exchanges. Indeed, I offered and he accepted a position as an OTB associate blogger last February, shortly before deployment, but he was ordered to stop all blogging not approved by Army brass almost immediately thereafter.

He did ultimately get the opportunity to blog at the Rocky Mountain News. In his last missive for them, he wrote about spending Christmas handing out toys to Iraqi children. And a little about the nature of the enemy:

Handing out gifts is great fun, but in Iraq you always have to be alert for the possibility that the enemy will take advantage of the opportunity to turn such an event to their advantage. Iraqi soldiers handing how clothing is good for building relationships between the Iraqi Army and the Iraqi people. A suicide bomb in a crowd of children seeking gifts could destroy that in a heartbeat, however, so while we enjoyed the scene of the Iraqi soldiers handing out clothes, toys, candy, and more to the hordes of Iraqi children, we were pleased to see that they also remained alert to potential threats, and they handed out a lot of great gifts that, we hope, will provide just a little help to families down on their luck.

He expressed these wishes in his post-mortem message:

What I don’t want this to be is a chance for me, or anyone else, to be maudlin. I’m dead. That sucks, at least for me and my family and friends. But all the tears in the world aren’t going to bring me back, so I would prefer that people remember the good things about me rather than mourning my loss. (If it turns out a specific number of tears will, in fact, bring me back to life, then by all means, break out the onions.) I had a pretty good life, as I noted above. Sure, all things being equal I would have preferred to have more time, but I have no business complaining with all the good fortune I’ve enjoyed in my life. So if you’re up for that, put on a little 80s music (preferably vintage 1980-1984), grab a Coke and have a drink with me. If you have it, throw ‘Freedom Isn’t Free’ from the Team America soundtrack in; if you can’t laugh at that song, I think you need to lighten up a little. I’m dead, but if you’re reading this, you’re not, so take a moment to enjoy that happy fact.

Here’s one of many versions of the song via YouTube:

While this shouldn’t need saying, it probably does:

I do ask (not that I’m in a position to enforce this) that no one try to use my death to further their political purposes. I went to Iraq and did what I did for my reasons, not yours. My life isn’t a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side. If you think the U.S. should stay in Iraq, don’t drag me into it by claiming that somehow my death demands us staying in Iraq. If you think the U.S. ought to get out tomorrow, don’t cite my name as an example of someone’s life who was wasted by our mission in Iraq. I have my own opinions about what we should do about Iraq, but since I’m not around to expound on them I’d prefer others not try and use me as some kind of moral capital to support a position I probably didn’t support. Further, this is tough enough on my family without their having to see my picture being used in some rally or my name being cited for some political purpose. You can fight political battles without hurting my family, and I’d prefer that you did so.

Matt Burden, Soccer Dad, the Protein Wisdom gang, Bob Owens, John Cole, Mike Hendrix, and other bloggers express their sentiments. More will follow as word spreads.

The Rocky Mountain News has published a moving obituary.

He was the first casualty for 2008 in Iraq. And a small part of Maj. Andrew Olmsted likely would’ve chuckled at that fact. It would be droll and play into his sense of self-deprecation.

But for everyone else, the news would be devastating.

Quite right.

As expected, many, many more bloggers have added their tributes: Phil Carter, John Donovan, TigerHawk, Michael Totten, Noah Shachtman, Bruce McQuain, Joe Katzman, Kate McMillan, Matt Yglesias, Virginia Postrel, BitchPhD, Brad DeLong, Kevin Hayden, and many, many, more.

Tim Blair cranks up the ’80s music: “Life During Wartime” by Talking Heads.

Jim Henley, following Andy’s injunction to remember him as he was, quips, “Dude, check it out! Your last post is getting linked everywhere!” He follows it with a more maudlin post, describing their friendship-by-correspondence.

The Army has quickly backtracked on its new policy that would have effectively killed milblogging. In an official (yet, oddly, not-for-attribution) release, the military explains:

In no way will every blog post/update a Soldier makes on his or her blog need to be monitored or first approved by an immediate supervisor and Operations Security (OPSEC) officer. After receiving guidance and awareness training from the appointed OPSEC officer, that Soldier blogger is entrusted to practice OPSEC when posting in a public forum.

Indeed, they claim no real change was ever in the offing:

Army Regulation 350-1, “Operations Security,” was updated April 17, 2007 – but the wording and policies on blogging remain the same from the July 2005 guidance first put out by the U.S. Army in Iraq for battlefield blogging. Since not every post/update in a public forum can be monitored, this regulation places trust in the Soldier, Civilian Employee, Family Member and contractor that they will use proper judgment to ensure OPSEC.

They further clarify:

Soldiers do not have to seek permission from a supervisor to send personal E-mails. Personal E-mails are considered private communication. However, AR 530-1 does mention if someone later posts an E-mail in a public forum containing information sensitive to OPSEC considerations, an issue may then arise.

Soldiers may also have a blog without needing to consult with their immediate supervisor and OPSEC officer if the following conditions are met:

1. The blog’s topic is not military-related (i.e., Sgt. Doe publishes a blog about his favorite basketball team).
2. The Soldier doesn’t represent or act on behalf of the Army in any way.
3. The Soldier doesn’t use government equipment when on his or her personal blog.

[...]

Just as in 2005 and 2006, a Soldier should inform his or her OPSEC officer and immediate supervisor when establishing a blog for two primary reasons:
1. To provide the command situational awareness.
2. To allow the OPSEC officer an opportunity to explain to the Soldier matters to be aware of when posting military-related content in a public, global forum.

None of that’s unreasonable on its face. Then again, many, including Andrew Olmstead, have essentially been told that blogging is off limits to them — and that was before this new/not new policy went into effect.

UPDATE: This is an official U.S. Army Public Affairs “Fact Sheet” dated yesterday. The source which passed it to me could not release it under their own name but I now have the release direct from DoD. It is to be posted on their Web site shortly.

The number two man in al Qaeda in Iraq has been killed. Again.

The leader of al Qaeda in Iraq has been wounded and his top aide killed in a clash with police, an Iraqi Interior Ministry spokesman told CNN Thursday. Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf said Iraqi police got into a firefight with insurgents on the road between Falluja, west of Baghdad, and Samarra, north of Baghdad, and wounded Abu Ayyub al-Masri. Abu Abdullah al-Majamiai, al-Masri’s top aide, was killed, he said. (Watch how an Iraqi minister described the firefight Video)

The group was trying to enter the town of Balad, Khalaf said. Khalaf said Iraqi police have the body of al-Majamiai.

CNN could not independently confirm the report and CNN’s Michael Ware in Baghdad said Iraqi officials would not say whether al-Masri was in custody. The U.S. military — who wrongly reported last October that al-Masri had been killed — referred reporters to the Iraqi government.

Al-Masri, also known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, is an Egyptian who took over the leadership of al Qaeda in Iraq in June after the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The tactical and strategic result will likely be, as in the seemingly dozens of previous times we’ve killed a top leader of al Qaeda, virtually nil. Still, killing them has a moderate boost in morale and can’t be a bad thing, presuming it’s done without killing innocents or untoward damage to the infrastructure.

Presumably, there’s a finite supply of these people since, one would think, it would be difficult to be taken seriously in such a position prior to age twenty and, thus, it takes at least that long to grow one. Otherwise, though, it doesn’t take an inordinate amount of technical or tactical competence to murder hapless civilians in a marketplace.

UPDATE: Andrew Olmstead hopes this “indicates that the Iraqi police are improving in their ability to take on the insurgency.” Spook86 argues that Task Force 145 is closing in al Qaeda more generally.

Amanda Marcotte has resigned as John Edwards’ blogger, on the basis that she was creating a distraction for the campaign. Rather than stop there, though, she plays the victim.

Unfortunately, Bill Donohue and his calvacade of right wing shills don’t respect that a mere woman like me could be hired for my skills…

What in the world does gender have to do with it? Women have been in key positions on presidential campaigns for years now. Susan Estrich ran Michael Dukakis’ 1988 campaign and Donna Brazile did the same for Al Gore in 2000. Not to put too fine a point on it but campaign blogger is several steps down the ladder.

In fact, he’s made no bones about the fact that his intent is to “silence” me, as if he—a perfect stranger—should have a right to curtail my freedom of speech.

I’m not a Bill Donohue fan. (I’m not too keen on Phil Donohue, either, for that matter.) Still, he was making no attempt to “silence” Amanda Marcotte, of whom, like the rest of us out here, 99.99% of the country had never heard. It seems that I read somewhere, though, that freedom of speech includes the right to criticize the opinions and language expressed by others.

Why? Because I’m a woman? Because I’m pro-choice? Because I’m not religious?

No, Yes, and Yes. Again, your femaleness has nothing to do with it. It’s because you were working for a man who aspired to be president of the United States and you expressed political views that Donohue disagrees with strongly in a manner that even your candidate found “personally offensive.” If George W. Bush had hired Jeff Goldstein or Charles Johnson in a similar position, I suspect you might have expressed an opinion.

It’s come to my attention that Donohue’s attempts to separate the Edwards campaign from their employees that were chosen for our skills and talents may in fact be in violation of the tax laws.

I would love to see the tax exempt status stripped from a whole lot of groups who engage in political activity. It’s rather ironic, though, to post that sentence immediately after pointing with pride to a letter to the New York Times from Frances Kissling, the president of Catholics for a Free Choice. After all, Kissling is doing precisely what you found so offensive coming from Donohue: Engaging in political speech on one ideological interpretation of Catholic teaching. (A distinctly minority one, in her case, I might add.)

The blogosphere, obsessed as we are with all things blogosphere, is all over this.

• Patrick Frey is “genuinely, sincerely saddened.”
• AllahPundit has video of Marcotte’s appearance on O’Reilly.
• Dale Franks thinks “maybe people don’t dislike her because she is a woman; maybe people dislike her because she is a jerk.”
• Ace: “She’s pretty sure that William Donahue went after her so hard because she has a vagina.”
• Greg Tinti: “Your heart goes out to poor, poor Amanda, doesn’t it? No, mine neither.”
• Joe Gandelman: “Anyone who works for a campaign could be subject to intense scrutiny if they work in an outreach or public relations-type position.”
• Chris Bowers: “People are also expected to never say anything that anyone would ever find offensive.”
• Bride of Acheron: “I imagine Donohue and company ain’t seen nothing yet, on the profane denunciation of their pious theocracy.”
• Heraclitus has an interesting discussion about the difference tolerance and respect.
• Lorie Byrd: “Blah, blah, blah…it was all the rightwing godbags’ fault, blah, blah, blah. No way could it be because of her inability to control her filthy hate-spewing mouth.”
• Andrew Olmstead: “By entering the blogosphere, we choose to put our opinions in print where anyone can see what we have to say. In so doing, most of us look forward to drawing some attention to our ideas. We cannot then turn around and expect to have those ideas overlooked when they become inconvenient.”
• Taylor Marsh: “she remained true to herself throughout. It’s Edwards who was clueless about whom he’d hired.” [Forgetting, of course, that non-apology apology about how her true self was just a satire. -ed.]
• Ron Chusid didn’t read Pandagon before this but will now.
• Commissar: “Notice the frequent insistence that ‘Religious bigots like Donohue don’t speak for all Catholics.’ Well, tell ya what, I am an atheist, and spigot-bigots like you don’t speak for me.”
• Kathryn Jean Lopez: “Marcotte meanwhile appears to be taking a cue from Nancy Pelosi and playing the gender card, among other silly victimization routes.”
• Don Surber: “[W]hen you sign her on because of her fame as a blogger, you get what she was blogging about.”
• Andrew Sullivan: “To be honest, I find the whole idea of bloggers as an integral part of political campaigns a little creepy. When I started blogging, many saw it primarily as a way to challenge those in power – whether in the media or politics or the church or wherever. It was a way to expand the individual’s ability to speak and be heard, as a means to deepen scrutiny of the powerful.”
• Good Lt.: “By harassment, she merely meant being quoted accurately for the world outside of Pandagon readers to behold.”
• Jeff Goldstein: “Instead, she continues to see conspiracies rather than geniune outrage—and in so doing, she continues to lean on the crutch of her collective rather than taking a good hard look at her method of discourse.” [Dude... -ed.]
• Ed Morrissey has the best headline: “Marcotte Quits, Sun To Rise In East In The Morning”
• Mark Coffey: “Yes, if there is one thing missing from our public discourse, it’s more people willing to describe the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit in a highly sexualized, wholly inappropriate manner…”
• Michelle Malkin has an extensive roundup. She observes, “So much for that sincere apology. Good news for the nutroots: She’s free, free again to yell ‘Jeebus’ all she wants!”

It should be noted that Melissa McEwan has not resigned. That should further emphasize that, although they were lumped together in the press, their writing was actually quite different. Aside from being too-clever-by-half in the use of words like “Christofascist,” nobody has ever pointed to anything McEwan has written that approaches Marcotte’s vitriol.

As an aside, I find it terribly amusing that the top post at Pandagon as I compose this highlights the fact that there are entire categories on the blog for “Censure the F—er” and “A–holes.” Somehow, I don’t think Jesse Taylor or Ezra Klein created those.

William Arkin has created quite a stir with a blog post reacting to a recent NBC report on troops’ frustrations with criticism from the public.

He starts off with a reasonable premise:

I’m all for everyone expressing their opinion, even those who wear the uniform of the United States Army. But I also hope that military commanders took the soldiers aside after the story and explained to them why it wasn’t for them to disapprove of the American people.

Indeed, soldiers work for the public and we need to be careful to beat back the natural tendency of the warrior class to develop a Praetorian Guard mentality. The oft-quoted lines of the fictional Colonel Jessep are quite seductive:

You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post.

Military society can be quite insular even in garrison and it naturally becomes more so in the field. It’s natural for those putting their lives on the line to think they’re special. But we must be careful they don’t adopt the Jessep attitude. The public and its political leaders have every right, even the duty, to question the manner in which our freedom is safeguarded.

It’s a punishable offense under the UCMJ for soldiers to display contempt toward their commander-in-chief. Why, then, is contempt for the president’s boss, the American people, tolerated?

Arkin’s next point is fair enough, too:

These soldiers should be grateful that the American public, which by all polls overwhelmingly disapproves of the Iraq war and the President’s handling of it, do still offer their support to them, and their respect. Through every Abu Ghraib and Haditha, through every rape and murder, the American public has indulged those in uniform, accepting that the incidents were the product of bad apples or even of some administration or command order.

Sure it is the junior enlisted men who go to jail, but even at anti-war protests, the focus is firmly on the White House and the policy. We just don’t see very man “baby killer” epithets being thrown around these days, no one in uniform is being spit upon.

That, of course, is as it should be. Not blaming all soldiers for the bad actions of a few is akin to not blaming all blacks for the crimes of a few. Then again, it wasn’t all that long ago that we did. In Vietnam, the handful of atrocities were held against the military in general. Now, most people blame just the perpetrators–or the Bush administration.

Arkin goes on to argue that giving up his right of free speech is too steep a price to pay to avoid hurting the soldiers’ feelings. I made essentially the same point when I saw the video. He then goes a bridge too far, though, prompting even the likes of Andrew Olmstead to threaten him with physical violence:

But it is the United States and instead this NBC report is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary – oops sorry, volunteer – force that thinks it is doing the dirty work. The notion of dirty work is that, like laundry, it is something that has to be done but no one else wants to do it. But Iraq is not dirty work: it is not some necessary endeavor; the people just don’t believe that anymore.

American soldiers are not mercenaries. Yes, they’re paid a decent salary and there are monetary and other incentives offered to get people to enlist and re-enlist. That’s the price of a volunteer force in a free market. They are not, however, offering their services to the highest bidder. They work for the United States of America and only the United States of America.

The Defense Department has removed the limits on the active duty call-up period for Reserve Component soldiers.

The Pentagon has abandoned its limit on the time a citizen-soldier can be required to serve on active duty, officials said Thursday, a major change that reflects an Army stretched thin by longer-than-expected combat in Iraq. The day after President Bush announced his plan for a deeper U.S. military commitment in Iraq, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters the change in reserve policy would have been made anyway because active-duty troops already were getting too little time between their combat tours.

The Pentagon also announced it is proposing to Congress that the size of the Army be increased by 65,000, to 547,000 and that the Marine Corps, the smallest of the services, grow by 27,000, to 202,000, over the next five years. No cost estimate was provided, but officials said it would be at least several billion dollars.

Until now, the Pentagon’s policy on the Guard or Reserve was that members’ cumulative time on active duty for the Iraq or Afghan wars could not exceed 24 months. That cumulative limit is now lifted; the remaining limit is on the length of any single mobilization, which may not exceed 24 consecutive months, Pace said. In other words, a citizen-soldier could be mobilized for a 24-month stretch in Iraq or Afghanistan, then demobilized and allowed to return to civilian life, only to be mobilized a second time for as much as an additional 24 months. In practice, Pace said, the Pentagon intends to limit all future mobilizations to 12 months.

The idea that reservists should not be available throughout the duration of a conflict has long struck me as absurd. After all, they are fully integrated into the Total Force and are vital to the success of a mission. During most of our previous wars, soldiers were not released from the service until the end of hostilities. And that included draftees; today’s reservists are all volunteers.

That said, this is a policy that should be set by Congress, not the Pentagon.

UPDATE: Andrew Olmstead, an Army Reservist who has volunteered for active duty in Iraq, makes two cogent points:

The Pentagon is claiming they hope to keep tours to 12 months, but that’s not really possible without significant changes to how we operate. Right now, a unit mobilizes, moves to a mobilization station for training that usually lasts two or three months, then deploys to theater for twelve months. Tack on a month to bring them home and demobilize them and you’re talking 15-18 month tours as a more likely number, assuming they don’t allow RC units to serve shorter tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Pentagon may be playing a semantic game with the word “deployment,” meaning only the oversees time. But Andrew is correct to include all the pre- and post- operational time away from one’s regular job.

I don’t know what this will do to retention in the reserve component, but I believe it’s realistic to expect it to hurt it. It’s not unreasonable to expect the reserve component to have to serve a single two-year tour on active duty while the nation is at war. Expecting them to do so repeatedly is likely sufficient to have reservists asking why they shouldn’t either go full time or get out, since they’re going to spend such a great deal of time mobilized in any case.

I made much the same argument throughout the 1990s and early part of this decade. So far, though, the evidence all points the other way. Reserve soldiers who have been deployed to combat actually have far higher retention rates than their non-deployed cohorts. It seems that, burdensome as it is, “getting” to perform the duties for which one trains tends to reinforce the desire to serve.

At an anecdotal/visceral level, though, I still think it possible to “break” the Reserve system. When I left active duty to return to graduate school after the first Gulf War, I fully intended to join a drilling reserve unit and serve until retirement. By the time I got settled into school, though, George H.W. Bush and then Bill Clinton were deploying reservists–especially Civil Affairs, where it would have been most logical for me to serve–into a steady stream of missions of which I disapproved. I would have been willing, at age 27, to be deployed to combat against enemies of the United States; I was not, however, willing to put my life on hold to do nation-building.

Then again, anyone who has signed up since 1992–which is damned near everybody now serving–has done so with full knowledge of the mission set. I hear much, much less grumbling from men in uniform than I did in the early 1990s about “this isn’t what the military is for.” It may well be that today’s soldier embraces a different conception of military life than my generation.

Related posts below the fold.

________

Elsewhere: James Joyner, “Backdoor Draft?” TCS, 11 January 2005.

OTB: Military Personnel, General

Army Short-Enlistment Option
Captain Brad Schwan Fighting Stop Loss
Don’t Dumb Down the Army
Join the Army or Go to Jail?
Reserve Captain Fulfills Contract, Can’t Resign
Army Stop-Loss Program Forces 50,000 into Extended Duty
Pentagon Report: Army Near Breaking Point
Pentagon Weighs Guard and Reserve Cuts
Myth of the Underprivileged Soldier
9th Circuit Won’t Stop Guardsman’s Deployment
Soldiers Sue over Extended Enlistments
A Military Stretched Thin
All-Volunteer Force?
NON-VOLUNTEER FORCE

OTB: Military Recruiting

Army Facing Officer Retention Crisis?
Army Shuns 75 Percent of Age Eligible Recruits
Counter-Recruiting Efforts Anger Pentagon
Military Recruiting Shortfall Hits Key Jobs Hardest
Military Attracting Fewer Black, Urban Recruits
Army Doubles Idiot Quotient
Army Recruiting High School Dropouts without GED
Defense Department Seeks to Raise Enlistment Age to 42
Pentagon Creating Student Database for Recruiting
Army Keeping Problem Soldiers to Keep Troop Levels Up
Army Using Video Game as Recruiting Tool
Army Offers 15-Month Enlistment Option
Army Taking Recruiting Holiday
Blue to Green Moving Slowly
Army Recruiters Say They Feel Pressure to Bend Rules
Recruiting Soldiers During Wartime Difficult
Military Recruiters Target Friends and Family
Recruiting During Wartime
RECRUTING AND MORALE
RECRUITING WOES?

OTB: IRR

Army Not Punishing AWOL IRR Members
Backdoor Draft? Reservists May Face Longer Tours of Duty
IRR Call-Ups Slow to Report
Army to Call Up Recruits Earlier
Reserve System Needs Change
Further IRR Call-Up Expected
IRR Call-Up Redux
IRR Call-Up Scam III
IRR Call-Up Scam II
IRR Call-Up Scam
IRR Call-Up?
Leaving the Military Reserves

Andrew Olmsted is headed to Iraq:

It seems that the situation in Iraq is worse than I thought. The Army has accepted my application to active duty and is sending me to Iraq as commander of a battalion MiTT team. That means I’ll embed with an Iraqi battalion and I and my team will attempt to train and assist that battalion to be able to stand on their own and serve the Iraqi government. Yes, I’m aware of the inherent difficulties in that mission, so you needn’t fill my comments with wry observations about what you think about the Iraqi Army. In about six months, I’ll be able to provide some firsthand experience, and we’ll see what comes of that.

A whole lot more Andrew Olmsteads commanding a lot more MiTT’s earlier in this thing would have been our best chance of success at this mission. I fear it’s too little, too late at this point but it’s a lot a more sane approach than simply sending random infantrymen to do … something.

My best wishes to Andrew for both mission success and a safe return for him and his men.

An aside: One of the dangers of reading these things via RSS feed is the lack of context. My first thought was that it is indeed worse than he thought if they’re sending Andrew Sullivan….

LCDR Charles Swift, the Navy JAG who defended Salim Ahmed Hamdan and just won his client’s case before the U.S. Supreme Court, is apparently about to be put out of the Navy.

The LAT reported Friday:

The U.S. Navy lawyer who challenged the Bush administration’s efforts to try terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, walked a professional tightrope between fellow officers trying to gain speedy convictions and what he considered a moral imperative to buck the chain of command and vigorously defend his client. Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift could have taken the easy route of arranging a plea bargain for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the Yemeni alleged to have worked as a driver and bodyguard for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. But fearful of the dangerous precedent that could be set by denying international standards of justice to those swept up in the war on terrorism, Swift battled to get the rights and protections of the Geneva Convention for his client.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush had overstepped his war powers in sending Hamdan and nine others to face military tribunals, America’s first since World War II. “I feel like we all won, that the rule of law won, and that is essentially what we are all about,” Swift said of the high court’s validation of his three-year campaign on behalf of his 36-year-old client.

Swift was assigned to defend Hamdan by the Pentagon in November 2003 and initially was ordered by a superior officer to secure a plea bargain so there would be a timely conviction. “I had the unenviable task of going down to this guy from Yemen in the uniform of people who had been treating him badly and saying, ‘If you don’t make a deal you may never see me again,’ ” Swift recalled of his first meeting at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo with Hamdan and his decision to fight a process stacked against the defendant.

[...]

Colleagues attributed the high court ruling to what they considered to be Swift’s determination to protect the integrity of U.S. jurisprudence against a Pentagon bent on retribution for terrorism attacks on U.S. forces. “It took exceptional courage. He had to risk himself being alienated from the larger military establishment,” said David Scheffer, law professor and director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University. “He must have known when he took this on that he was risking his career, and sadly he may have done that within the U.S. Navy.”

Though Swift’s successful challenge of the tribunal’s legitimacy will probably open doors in the private sector and academia for the Navy lawyer, Scheffer said, Swift has reportedly been passed over for promotion. “It was a gutsy move, and he did it with J/www.outsidethebeltway.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/LCDR_Swift.jpg” align=right hspace=5 alt=”Photo LCDR Charles Swift” /> Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift — the Navy lawyer who beat the president of the United States in a pivotal Supreme Court battle over trying alleged terrorists — figures he’ll probably have to find a new job. Of course, it’s always risky to compare your boss to King George III. Swift made the analogy to the court, saying President Bush had overstepped his authority when he bypassed Congress and set up illegal military tribunals to try Guantanamo detainees such as Swift’s alleged al-Qaida client, Salim Ahmed Hamdan.

The justices agreed, ruling 5-3 Thursday in favor of dismantling the current tribunal system. Despite his spectacular success, with the assistance of attorneys from the Seattle firm Perkins Coie, Swift thinks his military career is coming to an end. The 44-year-old Judge Advocate General officer, who was recently named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the country by The National Law Journal, was passed over for promotion last year as the high-profile case was making headlines around the world.

“I may be one of the most influential lawyers in America,” the Seattle University Law School graduate said, “but I won’t be in the military much longer. That irony did strike me.”

Swift’s future in the Navy now rests with another promotion board that is expected to render its decision in the next couple of weeks. Under the military’s system, officers need to be promoted at regularly scheduled intervals or their service careers are essentially over. “The way it works, the die was cast some months ago,” he said. “The decision has been made. I don’t know what it is yet.” But he thinks his chances are slim.

Asked if he believes he was passed over for promotion last year for political reasons, Swift would not speculate. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not going to worry about it. I didn’t volunteer for this. I got nominated for it. When I got it, I just decided to do the best I could.”

Swift has worked under two officers as a member of the small team of lawyers defending “enemy combatants” being held at Guantanamo Bay. Both of them spoke highly of Swift Friday and said they gave him very high ratings on his annual review, called a fitness report. “He’s doing a fantastic job,” said Swift’s current boss at the Office of Military Commissions (tribunals), Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan.

[...]

So the question is will Swift lay down his career because of his vigorous defense of a Yemeni tribesman who was Osama bin Laden’s driver in Afghanistan. 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.

So, nineteen paragraphs into a story with a headline that asserts Swift is being punished for his fearless derring do in speaking truth to power, we’re told by the boss whose ratings of Swift are likely to have the most impact on his chances for promotion the real reason he’s unlikely to make Commander: He hasn’t managed his career properly. The Navy doesn’t need people at command rank who have the same breadth of experience as a junior lieutenant. At that level, officers are expected to have served in a variety of assignments which have given them a broad understanding of their career field.

Swift hasn’t done that. Instead, he’s decided to continue to pursue assignments that allow him to do what he enjoys doing and is clearly quite good at: being a litigator. It might be that he’s so good at that role that the promotion board will decide he’s too valuable to the Navy to let go. But they don’t have the option of keeping him on as a LCDR: It’s either up or out.

I would note, too, that it’s not just the military that operates in this way. I know of professors denied tenure, and thus essentially fired, who won campus-wide “Teacher of the Year” honors. To students and the general public, that outcome seems outrageous. Yet tenure decisions revolve around arcane formulas weighing the full range of a professor’s contributions, including publications, conference presentations, campus and community service, and teaching. Teaching tends to be at or near the bottom of the list. Great lecturers are often lousy scholars and denied promotion over mediocre teachers who have more well-rounded CVs.

Further, as Andrew Olmstead points out, it’s not as if non-selection for promotion to Commander, especially for a JAG, is a form of retribution: “Looking at naval selection rates for staff ratings in 2005, JAG officers (Designation 2500) saw 25 of 40 officers in the primary zone, as Swift was last year, selected for promotion. That’s a selection rate of 62.5%, or not a lot better than flipping a coin.”

Of course, looking at facts isn’t as sexy as claiming “King George” is punishing officers who dare stand up to his evil power grab.

UPDATE: Some interesting background reading:

• Charles P. Pierce, “BEST & BRIGHTEST 2004: Charles Swift,” Esquire, Dec. 2004
• Phil Carter, LCDR Swift for the defense, Intel Dump, June 14, 2004.
• Jonathan Mahler, “Commander Swift Objects,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, June 13, 2004.

Ashton Carter and William Perry, assistant secretary of defense and SECDEF respectively, under President Bill Clinton, are take a surprisingly hawkish line on the North Korean missile test in an op-ed in today’s WaPo.

Should the United States allow a country openly hostile to it and armed with nuclear weapons to perfect an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering nuclear weapons to U.S. soil? We believe not. The Bush administration has unwisely ballyhooed the doctrine of “preemption,” which all previous presidents have sustained as an option rather than a dogma. It has applied the doctrine to Iraq, where the intelligence pointed to a threat from weapons of mass destruction that was much smaller than the risk North Korea poses. (The actual threat from Saddam Hussein was, we now know, even smaller than believed at the time of the invasion.) But intervening before mortal threats to U.S. security can develop is surely a prudent policy.

Therefore, if North Korea persists in its launch preparations, the United States should immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy the North Korean Taepodong missile before it can be launched. This could be accomplished, for example, by a cruise missile launched from a submarine carrying a high-explosive warhead. The blast would be similar to the one that killed terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq. But the effect on the Taepodong would be devastating. The multi-story, thin-skinned missile filled with high-energy fuel is itself explosive — the U.S. airstrike would puncture the missile and probably cause it to explode. The carefully engineered test bed for North Korea’s nascent nuclear missile force would be destroyed, and its attempt to retrogress to Cold War threats thwarted. There would be no damage to North Korea outside the immediate vicinity of the missile gantry.

The U.S. military has announced that it has placed some of the new missile defense interceptors deployed in Alaska and California on alert. In theory, the antiballistic missile system might succeed in smashing into the Taepodong payload as it hurtled through space after the missile booster burned out. But waiting until North Korea’s ICBM is launched to interdict it is risky. First, by the time the payload was intercepted, North Korean engineers would already have obtained much of the precious flight test data they are seeking, which they could use to make a whole arsenal of missiles, hiding and protecting them from more U.S. strikes in the maze of tunnels they have dug throughout their mountainous country. Second, the U.S. defensive interceptor could reach the target only if it was flying on a test trajectory that took it into the range of the U.S. defense. Third, the U.S. system is unproven against North Korean missiles and has had an uneven record in its flight tests. A failed attempt at interception could undermine whatever deterrent value our missile defense may have.

We should not conceal our determination to strike the Taepodong if North Korea refuses to drain the fuel out and take it back to the warehouse. When they learn of it, our South Korean allies will surely not support this ultimatum — indeed they will vigorously oppose it. The United States should accordingly make clear to the North that the South will play no role in the attack, which can be carried out entirely with U.S. forces and without use of South Korean territory. South Korea has worked hard to counter North Korea’s 50-year menacing of its own country, through both military defense and negotiations, and the United States has stood with the South throughout. South Koreans should understand that U.S. territory is now also being threatened, and we must respond. Japan is likely to welcome the action but will also not lend open support or assistance. China and Russia will be shocked that North Korea’s recklessness and the failure of the six-party talks have brought things to such a pass, but they will not defend North Korea.

This seems, indeed, strikes me a more plausible approach than trying to shoot the missile down from the sky.

Andrew Olmstead thinks this is “nuts,” though, given that our forces are stretched so thin with our deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq.

I don’t like the idea of a North Korea with nuclear missiles. But then, I’m not fond of the idea of China or Russia with nuclear missiles, either, but it’s an imperfect world. Launching an attack on North Korea opens up too many potentially disastrous outcomes for it to be a viable plan. Much as I dislike the thought, living with a nuclear North Korea seems like the least bad outcome available to us at the moment.

Were a ground war with the DPRK a likely outcome of a preemptive strike, I’d be inclined to agree. That outcome, however, seems incredibly remote. The nuclear threat is the only plausible one North Korea poses. We could topple Kim’s regime in less than two weeks and he knows it. And, unlike Iraq, we’d have no reason to occupy and risk fighting guerrillas.

Dave Shuler argues that such a strike would be a violation of Just War Theory, constituting an unprovoked war of aggression. He may be right, certainly under the spirit of the UN Charter. Unfortunately, his own argument contains its rebuttal: “If a North Korean missile were to strike U. S. territory, it would be an act of war and should be treated as such. President Bush should immediately put the North Koreans on notice to this effect.” Yet, surely, waiting for a DPRK nuclear missile strike is a bit late for action. And, while that possibility may be rather remote, the cloak of nuclear blackmail would hover over our relations with the Koreas and the region generally.

Austin Bay is amused, as am I, by this passage in the piece:

The Bush administration has unwisely ballyhooed the doctrine of “preemption,” which all previous presidents have sustained as an option rather than a dogma. It has applied the doctrine to Iraq, where the intelligence pointed to a threat from weapons of mass destruction that was much smaller than the risk North Korea poses. (The actual threat from Saddam Hussein was, we now know, even smaller than believed at the time of the invasion.) But intervening before mortal threats to U.S. security can develop is surely a prudent policy.

Writes Bay, “Note they put the knock on Bush’s pre-emption, then come out for pre-emption.”

Bryan Preston explains why the DPRK launch is almost certain to happen:

That North Korean ballistic missile is still sitting on the pad. It’s a liquid fuel rocket; it can only sit on the pad for so long before it either has to launch or must be de-fueled. Removing the fuel is an expensive, complicated process, and not one the North Koreans are likely to have either the money or the expertise to carry out without getting some technicians killed.

A good point.

James Robbins has an interesting idea of how the U.S. could respond to the promised DPRK test of their long range Taepodong-2 missile:

If the North Koreans follow tradition, they will test their new long range missile by firing it through the air space of another country, probably Japan, maybe the U.S. too if they can reach Alaska. Sounds like a great opportunity to test our missile -defense technology. North Korea has no right to test weapons over other countries, so they won’t have a leg to stand on legally. And it would be a great statement of our resolve to stand up to their aggressive behavior. Finally, it would be a high-profile way to demonstrate the effectiveness of our missile-defense systems.

Kevin Drum is intrigued by the idea as is Andrew Olmstead, who adds,

It would be as close to a real-world conditions test as we’re likely to get, it would allow us to see what we’re getting for our money, and advocates of missile defense could use the North Korean test as fodder to maintain support for the program. Even if it failed, that would be a prime opportunity to demagogue the issue and argue that we need to focus more heavily on missile defense because the next missile might not be a test.

I think “Even if” is a rather generous qualifier to “it failed.” I’d go with “Its almost certain failure….” Still, he’s right about the propaganda value in the event of a neutral failure.

Such a move could backfire horribly, however. Both a “successful” and a failed attempt to shoot down the DPRK missile could wind up killing people. One only has to remember back to the 1991 Gulf War, when American Patriot missiles shot down Iraqi scuds but quite likely killed many more people than saved by sending huge pieces of shrapnel into innocent population centers. It’s far from inconceivable that could happen in this case. And, of course, missile tests often reveal that the missile is not ready for prime time, as demonstrated by the missile not hitting its intended target. Presumably, this threat could be substantially mitigated by targetting the Korean missile while it’s still over the ocean. It could not be totally eliminated, however.