Episode 21: A Military Commissions Deep Dive

The National Security Law Podcast

Bobby Chesney and Steve Vladeck

Courses, Politics, News, Education, Government

4.8 • 646 Ratings

🗓️ 31 May 2017

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode is a bit different than normal. Instead of tearing through the latest developments in the wide world of national security law, Professors Vladeck and Chesney instead provide a deep-dive overview of military commissions. The explain what that label does and does not refer to, survey the pre-9/11 history (with an emphasis on key Supreme Court decisions like Ex parte Milligan and Ex parte Quirin), identify the key issues raised by the military commission system established after 9/11, track how those issues evolved over time (as the executive branch tinkered with the rules, as the courts weighed in, and as Congress ultimately intervened in 2006 and 2009), and review the state of currently-pending litigation challenging today's system. If you've been looking for a short-and-sweet way to understand what all the fuss is about, this is the episode for you!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello from Austin and welcome to episode 21, the National Security Law podcast, brought to you at the Strauss Center at the University of Texas. I'm Bobby Chesney. And I'm Steve Lodick and Bobby, I'm not here.
0:23.7	Where, where are you, Steve? I'm in Rhode Island. I'm on vacation, something new and crazy and different.
0:29.3	How did we do this? We invented a time, we solved the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. We invented a
0:35.2	Heisenberg compensator and we traveled back through time.
0:38.3	How appropriate of my recent reading list.
0:40.3	So it seems to us like it's Thursday, May 25th, last week.
0:45.3	It does seem like that.
0:46.3	And maybe what we did was we sat down to record an episode knowing that you'd be on vacation
0:52.3	and we didn't want listeners to go a week without having to put up with us.
0:55.8	I mean, right. I mean, how could you possibly live without us? Of course, we're taking a bit of a gamble
1:00.1	that nothing interesting in our world is going to happen. Steve, we should end this episode
1:04.3	with some predictions about stuff that might happen. Between now and Monday. Between Thursday afternoon
1:09.3	and, you know, through Memorial. So there's, you know,
1:11.8	there's this really bad, 1991 Steve Martin movie called L.A. story, which is like a sort of, it's,
1:17.5	how about mediocre Steve Martin movie, right? Where one of the many sort of bits is he's a weatherman
1:23.7	in L.A., right? And he pre-recorded the weather hits because the weather's always the same in LA. It's like, sun, sun, sun, sun, and it's pouring. So we can do some version of this?
1:32.3	Well, I mean, so we picked a topic. Leak, leak, leak, leak, leak. We picked a topic that I think is somewhat
1:36.8	insulated from this concern, right? We thought we would use this episode to do a super quick down-and-dirty primer on military commissions? Absolutely. So, friends, this is not a recap of the news since episode 20 in any way, because we don't know.
1:50.5	I mean, there was 30 seconds between episode 20 and episode 21, so there probably was no news.
1:55.0	We really needed something else to do that afternoon.
1:57.4	What it is instead is an attempt to kind of give listeners who are not steeped in the details of military commissions a good introduction to the topic and a framing for stuff that has come up a little bit already in this podcast series and is bound to come up some more.
2:12.3	Sure. So, you know, when we're talking about military commissions, let's be clear. I mean, the only military commissions that are really at play right now are the ongoing proceedings at Guantanamo, Bobby,
	...

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