On June 29, 2006, in a 5-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that military detainees in the war on terror, in this case Salim Ahmed Hamdan, were entitled to some protections under the Geneva Convention and that the federal government did not have the authority to set up these particular military commissions.
Hamdan, a bodyguard and personal driver for terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, had been captured by U. S. military forces during the invasion of Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. He was charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism and was ordered to be tried before a military commission authorized under Military Commission Order No. 1 of March 21, 2002. Hamdan, through his government-assigned navy attorney, Lt. Commander Charles Swift, filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus that argued that the military commission was illegal and lacked protections required under the Geneva Commission.
The decision overturning the war-crimes commission was a technical one based on statutory, not constitutional grounds. The Court, represented by Justice John Paul Stevens, and joined by Justices David Souter, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Anthony Kennedy, held that detainees were given one specific right under Common Article 3: the right to have criminal charges heard by a “regularly constituted court” created by an act of Congress. The Court expressly invited Congress to authorize military commissions.
Congress responded less than four months later to this decision by passing the Military Commission Act, which undid this ruling by establishing military commissions. This act ordered a stop to all habeas petitions. An appellate court upheld this provision in February 2007, and in April the U. S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to that ruling. The Justice Department petitioned for the dismissal of other habeas claims. Nonetheless, the definition of unlawful and enemy combatants gave rise to other legal challenges.
Helms, Jesse A., Jr. (1924-2008) politician
Born October 18, 1924, Jesse Alexander Helms served in the U. S. Senate from 1973 to 2002 and is recognized as one of the leading conservative politicians in the late 20th century.
Born the son of the fire and police chief of Monroe, North Carolina, Helms embodies the rock-ribbed values of the rural and small-town Protestant South. He attended Monroe public schools, Wingate Junior College and Wake Forest College. Helms chose a life of journalism and politics while a teenager. During World War II, he served as a Navy recruiter from 1942 to 1945. Following the war, he became city editor of the Raleigh (North Carolina) Times and director of news and programs for Tobacco Radio Network and radio station WRAL in Raleigh. In 1951 he became a Senate aide to Willis Smith (D-N. C.), after working in his campaign against Senator Frank Porter Graham. Graham, president of the University of North Carolina, symbolized southern liberalism. Helms designed many of the confrontational anticommunist and pro-segregationist campaign tactics used in the 1950 campaign. In 1953 Helms became an aide to Senator Alton Lennon (D-N. C.). The previous year, Helms had directed the radio-television campaign for the unsuccessful presidential race of Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia.
From 1953 through 1960, Helms was executive director of the North Carolina Bankers Association and served as editor of the Tarheel Banker, which became the largest state banking publication in the nation. He became a disciple of Austrian-born economist Ludwig von Mises, who asserted that socialist central planning was unsuitable for a modern economy.
From 1960 until his election to the Senate, Helms was an executive for the Capitol Broadcasting Company of Raleigh, North Carolina. He became known for his evening editorials during the tumultuous 1960s, in which he excoriated big government, big labor, the Soviet and Chinese Communist empires, sexual liberation, substance abuse, rioters, and civil rights activists. While Helms always supported the rule of law and opposed violence, he fiercely defended racial segregation and freely criticized Martin Luther King’s civil disobedience. Helms endorsed Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Republican presidential campaign. In 1970 he left the Democratic Party and joined the Republican Party. In 1972 he was drafted by powerful friends to run for the U. S. Senate.
President Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 landslide helped sweep Helms to his first Senate victory. There, he joined with New York senator James Buckley to promote conservative policies. These two freshmen senators refused to play the humble understudy role traditionally assigned to freshmen. Both men championed Soviet dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn and opposed DETENTE with the Soviet Union and legal abortion.
In the Senate Helms became known for his outspoken style and mastery of the Senate’s arcane parliamentary rules. Helms mastered the tactic of forcing recorded roll call votes on controversial issues such as detente, EEMI-NISM, abortion, busing, and aeeirmative action, and then using these recorded votes to political advantage. With his close friend Phyllis Schlaely, Helms founded the New Right movement.
During 1976, Helms, Buckley, and Schlafly backed Ronald W. Reagan’s insurgent challenge to Gerald R. Ford. Although Ford won the nomination, Reagan held a favorable position for 1980. During James Earl Carter, Jr.’s presidency, Helms continued to play “Senator No.” He harassed Carter’s policies, especially the proposed Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), and violated Senate custom by campaigning against liberal Republicans.
Ronald W. Reagan’s 1980 victory over Carter was especially sweet to Helms. It helped elect Helms’s ally, John East, to the other North Carolina Senate seat and brought Helms a committee chairmanship. Helms continued to hew to his uncompromising conservative principles, criticizing members of the Reagan administration, especially Secretaries of State Alexander M. Haig, Jr., and George Schultz, for being insufficiently hard-line. He warned repeatedly against Soviet advances in Central America. In 1984, in the most expensive Senate race to that time, Helms narrowly defeated North Carolina’s governor Jim Hunt. During the Hunt race, Helms for the first time courted the support of Aerican Americans.
Helms kept his conservative faith during the George H. W. Bush and William J. Clinton presidencies. When the Republicans gained control of the Senate in 1994, Helms served as the ranking Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Journalist Robert Novak accurately observed in 2001: “No single member of the U. S. Senate over the last generation has been so influential as Jesse Helms.”
In 2002 Helms announced that he would not seek reelection because of his failing health. His seat was won by Republican Elizabeth Dole, wife of former Republican Kansas senator and 1996 presidential candidate Robert Dole. After serving the U. S. Senate for almost three decades, he has stayed active by publishing a memoir, Here Is Where I Stand (2005), and spoke at many Republican gatherings. In 2006 he was diagnosed with multiinfarct dementia and left public life. Helms died on July 4, 2008.
See also conservative movement; elections; political parties.
Further reading: Ernest Furgurson, Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms (New York: Norton, 1986).
—Christopher Gray and Matthew C. Sherman
World History
