Researching Charles Swift

Swift used the civil courts to challenge the constitutionality of the military tribunals and the legal treatment of detainees in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), a case that went to the US Supreme Court and was decided in his client's favor. As a result, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 to authorize a form of military tribunals and incorporate the Court's concerns about reconciliation with the US Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions.

During his Navy career, Swift served in a variety of assignments, including at sea. After several years, he was approved to attend law school and, after graduation, in 1994 became a member of the Navy's legal corps. In 2003, he was assigned to the Department of Defense Office of Military Commissions, serving into early 2007. There he was assigned as defense counsel to Salim Ahmed Hamdan. Because of his challenges, Swift was helping make the law on detainee treatment in the war on terror.

In June 2006, Swift learned he had been "passed over" by the Navy (a second time) for promotion; as a result, under the military's "up or out" system, he had to retire in the spring of 2007. He learned of being passed over two weeks after the Supreme Court decided in Hamdan's favor, and intended to continue defending Hamdan as a civilian.

From 2007 through 2008, Swift taught at Emory Law School as a Visiting Associate Professor and Acting Director of its newly established International Humanitarian Law Clinic. Hamdan was convicted of one of his charges in 2008 but credited for time detained. He was returned to Yemen in 2008. Swift worked to appeal his conviction. In October 2012, Hamdan was acquitted of all charges in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

In 2014, Swift joined Constitutional Law Center for Muslims in America as its Director.

In 1879, he founded S.S.S as a partnership with Henry J. Lamar of Macon, Georgia and Jesse W. Rankin, a co-founder of the Metropolitan Street Railroad horsecars in Atlanta.The company became one of the wealthiest patent medicine concerns in the country, and S. S. S. had been introduced into every "nook and corner" of the US.

His mansion at the 215 Capitol Avenue (NW corner of Crumley Street) in the then-affluent Washington-Rawson neighborhood was later used as the Piedmont Sanitorium, which would become Piedmont Hospital. The Washington-Rawson neighborhood was razed in the early 1960s to make way for Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium and its parking lots; now the site is part of the large Turner Field parking lot.