Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld 548 US 557 (2006) Case Study

Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld 548 US 557 (2006) - Case Study Example Bush, President of the United States. After a year of detention, President Bush deemed him eligible to be tried before a military commission that was authorized under Military Commission Order No. 1. The military commission would have allowed the inclusion of evidence with no probative value or acquired through illegal means, made it possible that there be evidence used against the accused that the accused would not be able to see, and the appeals would only be within the Executive branch. Opposing this, Hamdan filed a writ of habeas corpus, in chief arguing that a military commission conducting trial in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and the Geneva Conventions should be declared illegal and with no power to proceed. Procedural History: Hamdan filed his petition before the United States District Court for the District of Colombia, which found in his favor. Upon Appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously revers ed the decision of the District Court. Subsequently, on 7 November 2005 the Supreme Court issued a writ of certiorari to hear the case, and it was argued before the said court on 28 March 2006. On 29 June 2006, the Supreme Court issued its decision, reversing the Court of Appeals and finding in favor of Hamdan. Issues: 1. The first issue is whether or not the provisions in the military commission that would allow the accused to be convicted using evidence that he had not seen or heard, or evidence that may not be in compliance with admissibility or relevancy rules in other court martial proceedings violate the uniformity rule and the principle that â€Å"no procedural rule must be contrary or inconsistent with the UCMJ†? 2. The second issue is whether or not Hamdan can invoke the guarantees of the Geneva Conventions given the contextual background of the capture of Hamdan, and giving due regard to the fact that such capture was done pursuant to the war with Al Qaeda, which is not a High Contracting Party to the Conventions? Holding: The Supreme Court answered in the affirmative to both questions. It held firstly that the deviations in the military commission rendered it defective, and secondly, that the Geneva Conventions could be validly invoked by Hamdan. Rationale: The Supreme Court relied on the case of Ex Parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (1942) as justification for granting certiorari to Hamdan, stating that trial by military commissions surfaces important questions about the balance of powers of the three branches of government. Likewise, the case of In Re Yamashita 327 U.S. 1, 11 (1946) recognizes that the exigencies of war may demand extraordinary measures. In the case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004) it reaffirmed the war powers of the President, including the authority to convene military commissions. With respect to the first question, the Supreme Court noted that in the military commission created by Military Commission Order No. 1, Section 6 permits exclusion of the accused from proceedings and denial of his and his civilian counsel’s access to evidence that may be used to convict him. The grounds for the denial of access "include the protection of information classified or classifiable . . .; information protected by law or rule from unauthorized disclosure; the physical safety of participants in Commission proceedings, including prospective

By contrasting these seven works, discuss the idea of the self (me, Essay

By contrasting these seven works, discuss the idea of the self (me, the artist, my portrait, my body) and what leads the viewer to identify with these works - Essay Example Organized loosely around the principle that a mimetic representation is one that "looks like" the subject, or more specifically has a photographic component to its content, then the self portraits of Chuck Close, Bruce Nauman, Andy Warhol, and arguably Christian Schad are mimetic in nature. Provisionally, while the Christian Schad painting lacks a photographic realism that the others to some degree or another elicit, the facial features of Schad in the self-portrait insofar that they are meant to correspond to the actual features of someone's face do so successfully. One could reasonably suggest that they could imagine a human being looking like the character in the Schad painting. This notion of being human plays an important role in our theoretical development of identity. Our responses to human facial features are deeply programmed into our biology, our ability to recognize pain, ecstasy, surprise or indignation based on the slightest of facial movements is highly refined. Moreove r, our penchant to anthropomorphize animal behaviors speaks to our deep desire to "find the human" in our world. Our concept of identity and self is intimately tied to the species of which we count ourselves as members. Thus some of the other pictures such as the Picasso, or The Tree of Life, or Psyche do not immediately strike us as examples of real people depicting their identity. This resistance derives from an inherent preference for human features, namely the eyes in order to properly judge identity. This preference is intimated by the phrase, "looking a person in the eyes," in order to gather something about who they are as people. This sort of species-mimetic cage of identity of self is exactly the sort of prison that the works of Ana Mendieta and Gina Pane are explicitly trying to escape. Though interestingly the photographically influenced works are not totally submissive to this warden of identity and each in their own way seeks to subtly subvert this dominant paradigm. Chuck Close is most intimately associated with the Photo-Realist school, whose emphasis was on technical mastery and detail. Though Close has worked with a number of different media formats, in this screenprint a photo is gridded and each individual block is then transposed onto a larger canvas. The work is intentionally pixilated to foreground this method, and as a result the notion of a photo-realistic portrayal of Close is oddly transformed into a somewhat fuzzy understanding of the identity of Chuck Close. One can choose to parse that in any number of ways, possibly that one "true" identity can never be literally transposed anywhere. Bruce Nauman's, Self-Portrait as a Fountain, seems less concerned about the nature of identity transposition and more focused on analyzing the semiotic chain between self and object. One might suggest that the print is a picture of some person spitting water out of his mouth and little else. The evidence for this is in fact compelling. Because of the photo-realistic image we are in little doubt that that person is or was in fact a human in existence somewhere in the world. In this sort of tactically blunt interpretation it might also be held that the water flowing out of