Here for details.
And here for the petition:
Andrew Jackson
Military Commission Adopts Seminole/Creek Analogy to al Qaeda as Law, But “Takes No Comfort”
Here is the opinion in United States v. Hamdan, a companion case to al Bahlul (the opinion for which is still pending): Hamdan Opinion.
Hamdan, you may recall, was the subject of a major U.S. Supreme Court ruling a few years back, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.
Here is the relevant text from the opinion (starting on page 52, 53, and concluding at page 63):
2. 19th Century Irregular Warfare and Aiding the Enemy
In 1818, during the first Seminole War, General Andrew Jackson and the U.S. Army entered Florida, which at that time was neutral Spanish territory, in pursuit of Indian warriors. David Glazier, The Laws of War: Past, Present, and Future: Precedents Lost: The Neglected History of the Military Commission, 46 Va. J. Int’l L. 5, 27 (2005) (citations omitted) Two British citizens, Arbuthnot and Ambrister, were aiding the Indian warriors. Id. (citation omitted). Following their capture, a special court,117 military commission,118 or court-martial119 was convened to try the two men. Arbuthnot was found guilty of, “Charge 1st. Exciting and stirring up the Creek Indians to war against the United States. . . [and] Charge 2d. [A]iding, abetting, and comforting the enemy, supplying them with the means of war,” and he was sentenced to hang. Glazier, supra n. 113, at 28 (citations omitted). Ambrister was convicted of, “Charge 1st. Aiding, abetting, and comforting the enemy, supplying them with the means of war, he being a subject of Great Britain, at peace with the United States, and lately an officer in the British colonial marines. . .” and, “Charge 2d. Leading and commanding [Indians], in carrying on a war against the United States.” Id. at 28 (citing Minutes of the Proceedings of a Special Court, H.Q. Div. of the South at 154-55, 164; H.Q. Div. of the South, G.O. (Apr. 29, 1818)). Colonel Winthrop criticized General Jackson for approving a harsher sentence than the tribunal adjudged on reconsideration.120 Birkhimer, however, considered General Jackson’s actions to be lawful in every respect.121 Winthrop did not criticize the decision to charge Arbuthnot and Ambrister with aiding the enemy. 1920 Winthrop, supra n. 23, at 464-65.
The court takes no comfort in the historical context in which these events occurred or the ultimate disposition of these cases. We cite to these events for their historical occurrence as an embryonic effort of the United States to deal with the complexity of fighters in irregular warfare. In contrast, under the 2006 M.C.A., AUECs have significant due process and are not subject solely to the discretion of the executive. See n. 171 infra.
***
As Attorney General Speed explains at p. 58, ante, the offense against the law of war is complete when these individuals joined the guerilla band. Of course, some action is usually required to manifest that they have joined the guerilla band, such as “taking up arms,” providing advice on how to destroy trains or telegraphs, or providing their presence on a raid. See p. 58, supra. A person can also violate the law of war by providing assistance to a guerilla band, and Civil War military commissions punished numerous offenders for providing a wide array of such assistance. These examples of Civil War-era military commission convictions for providing support or aid to insurgents and guerillas illustrate the long-standing prohibitions against conduct similar to appellant’s aid to al Qaeda.
(red emphasis ours).
Andrew Jackson Article in ICT, with Fletcher Interview
Matthew’s Commentary:
Coming on the heels of the Geronimo/bin Laden Incident, what do you make of the government’s expropriation of indigenous history— using Geronimo as the code name for Osama bin Laden, and then citing the Jackson’s murderous actions against the Seminoles and Brits as a precedent for the prosecution of Al Qaeda suspects?
Generations of West Point officers learn about war from studying the “Indian wars,” and so it would make perfect sense for them to draw an analogy between Indians and al Qaeda. The military tradition is that the Indians were the bad guys, they were savage and engaged in non-traditional, even scary warfare, and that they had no rights under the U.S. Constitution. As such, they were fair game for anything—anything at all—the U.S. military wanted to do to them. Preemptive attacks on unarmed women and children like Wounded Knee, indefinite detention in concentration camps like Fort Sill, mass executions for trumped up war crimes like at Fort Snelling all of it legally justifiable from the point of the view of the military. Same is true in the Department of Justice, where in the days following 9/11, Bush Administration attorneys like John Yoo (now a Berkeley law professor) and Jay Bybee (now a Ninth Circuit judge) argued that the President needed no authorization from Congress to engage in torture, establish military jails and commissions to house and try al Qaeda suspects, etc., through extensive reliance on Indian war-related “precedents” involving self-serving legal opinions about the Modocs, the Seminoles, the Dakota at Fort Snelling, and others. It was Yoo and Bybee who authored so many of the so-called “torture papers” who first explicitly compared the Seminoles and other tribes to al Qaeda. The military prosecutors are just cribbing from them.
Sam Morison on the Seminoles, Andrew Jackson, and American Military Justice
Samuel T. Morison has posted History and Tradition in American Military Justice on SSRN, at at. It is forthcoming this fall in the Univ. of Penn. Journal of Int’l Law. Here’s the abstract:
At present, there are two military commission cases involving terrorism defendants incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay making their way through the appellate courts. In both cases, the defendants are challenging their convictions for “providing material support for terrorism.” While this is a federal offense that could be prosecuted in an Article III court, the legal issue in these appeals is whether providing material support is also a war crime subject to the jurisdiction of a military tribunal. Congress incorporated the offense into the Military Commissions Act, but that is not dispositive, since it is arguably beyond Congress’ legislative competence to create war crimes out of whole cloth and then impose them on foreign nationals having no jurisdictional nexus to the United States.
As a result, the Government has not disputed that there must be at least some historical evidence that the conduct now styled “providing material support” to an enemy previously has been treated as a war crime, where the defendant was a non-resident alien who owed no duty of allegiance to the injured State. In what might be fairly described as a desperate attempt to discharge its burden of persuasion, the Government has now embraced the only “precedent” that comes close to fitting this description. This is problematic, however, because it is also one of the most notorious episodes in the history of American military justice.
In 1818, then Major General Andrew Jackson led an armed invasion of Spanish Florida, thereby instigating the First Seminole War. In the course of the conflict, his troops captured two British citizens who had been living in Florida among the Seminole Indians. In his inimitable style, Jackson impetuously ordered the summary trial and execution of these men, allegedly for “inciting” the Seminoles to engage in “savage warfare” against the United States. Worse yet, Jackson’s immediate motivation for the invasion was to recapture fugitive slaves, who had escaped from the adjacent States and found refuge among the Seminoles. In addition to territorial expansion, his mission was to return this “property” to their “rightful” owners and prevent Florida from serving as a safe haven for runaway slaves.
Remarkably, the legal basis of the Government’s assertion of military jurisdiction over material support charges therefore rests on Jackson’s decision to execute two men, who were almost certainly innocent, in the context of a war of aggression waged to vindicate the property rights of antebellum Southern slaveholders. The purpose of this essay is to reintroduce the episode to a wider audience, and to reflect on the implications of the Government’s decision to rely on it as a precedent for a modern war crimes prosecution.
Fletcher & Vicaire: “Indian Wars: Old and New”
Matthew Fletcher and Peter Vicaire have posted “Indian Wars: Old and New” on SSRN (download here). This is a paper prepared for the Journal of Gender, Race, and Justice’s 15th Anniversary symposium, “War On … The Fallout of Declaring War on Social Issues.”
Here is the abstract:
This short paper analyzes American history from the modern “wars” on poverty, drugs, and terror from the perspective of American Indians and Indian tribes. These domestic “wars” are aptly named (it turns out), as the United States often blindly pursues broad policy goals without input from tribal interests, and without consideration to the impacts on Indians and tribes. With the possible exception of the “war on poverty,” these domestic wars sweep aside tribal rights, rights that are frequently in conflict with the overarching federal policy goals.
This essay explores three declared domestic wars, and their impacts on American Indian tribes and individual Indians, in loose chronological order, starting with the war on poverty. As Part 1 demonstrates, the Johnson Administration’s Great Society programs helped to bring American Indian policy out of the dark ages of the era of termination, in which Congress had declared that national policy would be to terminate the trust relationship. Part 2 describes the war on drugs, declared by the Reagan Administration, which had unusually stark impacts on reservation communities both in terms of law enforcement, but also on American Indian religious freedom. Part 3 examines the ongoing war on terror, which Bush Administration officials opined has its legal justification grounded in part on the Indian wars of the 19th century. The war on terror marks America’s return to fighting a new Indian war, where the adversary is illusive and motivated, and where the rule of law is literally obliterated.
Federal Government Compares Seminoles to Al Qaeda in Military Commissions Case
In defending its use of military commissions to try a person accused of aiding the enemy, the government states:
Ambrister and Arbuthnot, both British subjects without any duty or allegiance to the United States, were tried and punished for conduct amounting to aiding the enemy. Examination of their case reveals that their conduct was viewed as wrongful, in that they were assisting unlawful hostilities by the Seminoles and their allies. Further, not only was the Seminole belligerency unlawful, but, much like modern-day al Qaeda, the very way in which the Seminoles waged war against U.S. targets itself violated the customs and usages of war. Because Ambrister and Arbuthnot aided the Seminoles both to carry on an unlawful belligerency and to violate the laws of war, their conduct was wrongful and punishable.
The quote appears on page 25 of this brief: Bahlul Brief IRT Specified Issues (11 Mar 2011). As one reader notes, “This is an unbelievable statement, given that the U.S. was invading Spanish‑held Florida, and General Jackson was burning entire Indian villages in a campaign of extermination. You have to wonder why they had to reach for this analogy.”
In many of the so-called torture papers, Bush Administration lawyers frequently referred to Indian wars as the closest analog to the war on terror. Here is a sample:
American precedents also furnish a factual situation that is more closely analogous to the current attacks to the extent that they involve attacks by non-state actors that do not take place in the context of a rebellion or civil war. The analogy comes from the irregular warfare carried on in the Indian Wars on the western frontier during the nineteenth century. Indian “nations” were not independent, sovereign nations in the sense of classical international law, nor were Indian tribes rebels attempting to establish states. Cf. Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. (5 Pet.) 1, 17 (1831) (Marshall, C.J.) (describing Indians tribes as “domestic dependent nations”).
Here is the Nov. 2011 memo in which this quote appears. Peter Vicaire and I will be publishing a short paper titled “Indian Wars: Old and New” in the Iowa Journal of Gender, Law, and Justice that will be describing how the government asserts this argument and others.
John Yoo on Andrew Jackson
John Yoo, author of some of the notorious torture papers, just published “Andrew Jackson and Presidential Power” in the Charleston Law Review. I guess it’s not surprising that a scholar with a such robust view of Executive power would try to resurrect Jackson. Here’s an excerpt concerning Worcester v. Georgia:
Although Jackson did nothing to support the Court’s constitutional powers, he acted to defuse the political crisis. Rather than defy the Supreme Court outright, the Georgia courts simply refused to acknowledge the Supreme Court’s decision. Without any formal acceptance or rejection of Worcester by the state courts, the Supreme Court had no formal legal authority to order Georgia to obey the decision. Even if Georgia had openly refused to obey Worcester, the Supreme Court recessed for nine months and was unable to reverse the State’s decisions. Jackson commented that “the decision of the supreme court has fell still born, and they find they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.” The confrontation, however, generated political trouble for the Administration. Newspapers widely reprinted Worcester, which served as ammunition to attack Jackson in his soon-approaching re-election campaign. Jackson and Van Buren worked through the party machinery to convince the Governor of Georgia to commute the sentences in exchange for the missionaries’ agreement not to seek further Court review. Indian issues would figure in the election of 1832, and Jackson would take his overwhelming re-election as a validation of his Indian removal policy.
Even though this paragraph seems internally inconsistent, it appears to be a more nuanced view of the Worcester crisis for Jackson.
Andrew Jackson, the Cherokees & the Judgment Power
Ok, so earlier today I posted two articles back to back for a reason. They are (1) a light LA Times commentary on Andrew Jackson (okay dude or Hitler?); and (2) a dense law review article on the Article III judgment power by William Baude. They’re connected, in my opinion, although I doubt it is apparent to anyone but me.
Here it goes:
Turtle Talk 
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