OUR PICKSIranian Election Hacking | Climate Migration Comes Home | Stadiums Are Embracing Face Recognition, and more
· Secretary Austin’s Fateful GTMO Plea Deals Decision
The history of torture-tainted cases in the military commissions demonstrates the near impossibility of obtaining death penalty judgments
· Climate Migration Comes Home
A review of Abrahm Lustgarten, On the Move (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2024)
· Stadiums Are Embracing Face Recognition. Privacy Advocates Say They Should Stick to Sports
Protesters took to Citi Field Wednesday to raise awareness of the facial recognition systems that have become common at major league sporting venues
· The US Government Wants You—Yes, You—to Hunt Down Generative AI Flaws
The AI ethics nonprofit Humane Intelligence and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology are launching a series of contests to get more people probing for problems in generative AI systems
· Why Everyone’s Suddenly Talking About Iranian Election Hacking
America’s Middle Eastern adversary is occupying an arena typically dominated by Russia and China
Secretary Austin’s Fateful GTMO Plea Deals Decision (Claire O. Finkelstein, Alberto Mora, and Stephen N. Xenakis, Lawfare)
Several weeks ago, Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), along with two other defendants—Walid Bin Attash and Mustafa al Hawsawi—agreed to plead guilty before the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay and to testify publicly about their roles in the 9/11 attacks in exchange for serving life sentences at the Guantanamo facility. Yet within 48 hours of the announcement of the epic plea deal, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had issued an order canceling the deal and withdrawing the authority of Susan Escallier, the convening authority of the commissions, to enter into pretrial agreements. This week, the parties in the cases before the commission must present their arguments on the question of whether Secretary Austin had the right to void the plea bargain.
On the one hand, the secretary wields the power of the president, whose constitutional Article II authority gives the executive branch extensive control over the military commissions. This authority is also codified in 10 U.S.C.§ 1802, known as the Military Commissions Act of 2009. But Austin arguably used that authority improperly and crossed the threshold into what is known as “unlawful command influence” under 10 U.S.C.§ 837, a standard that is also built into the Military Commissions Act.
Unlawful command influence forbids a superior in the chain of command from attempting to coerce or put undue pressure on a judge, a member of a jury, or any individual involved in a military legal proceeding. For example, the statute provides: “No court-martial convening authority, nor any other commanding officer, may censure, reprimand, or admonish the court or any member, military judge, or counsel thereof, with respect to the findings or sentence adjudged by the court, or with respect to any other exercise of its or his functions in the conduct of the proceeding.”
