Apart from his Facebook project, for the better part of the last two decades, Aaron Sorkin has been a political screenplay scribe for hire. Looks like he”ll be adapting the Smoke House (Heslov and Clooney) project based on Jonathan Mahler’s book “The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power”.
The Challenge would see Clooney play Navy lawyer Charles Swift in the drama about the effort by Swift and Georgetown U. law professor Neal Katyal to ensure a fair trial for Osama bin Laden’s driver, Salim Hamdan, who’d been held at Guantanamo Bay for five years. Hamdan was sentenced Aug. 7 by a panel of military officers at Guantanamo Bay to a prison term of 66 months, including time already served. The Yemeni-born convict was found guilty of material support for terrorism but cleared of the more serious charges of conspiracy to commit murder, seen by some analysts as a victory for retired naval officer Swift’s efforts. Mahler’s book ends with the landmark 2006 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the military tribunals ordered for Hamdan and other Guantanamo Bay detainees violated the Geneva Convention and the Uniform Code for Military Justice.
