Pruning Shears

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Some real news - a judge actually endorsed part of the administration’s shadow justice system:

A federal judge in Washington ruled Tuesday that the government was properly holding two Guantánamo detainees as enemy combatants, the first clear-cut victories for the Bush administration in what are expected to be more than 200 similar cases.
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Because of classified evidence relied upon by the government, both hearings were conducted mostly behind closed doors.

Lawyers for both men said they were considering appeals.

A lawyer for Mr. Sliti, Cori Crider of the British legal group Reprieve, said that there were many issues for appeal, including the government’s reliance on classified evidence her client was not permitted to see.

Ms. Crider argued that the hearing did not conform to some requirements of the Supreme Court’s June ruling that opened the door for habeas corpus cases by most of the remaining 250 detainees being held at Guantánamo. Detainees’ lawyers greeted that ruling at the time as a watershed defeat for the Bush administration.

“The fact that the word ‘habeas’ was used doesn’t mean that the process was fair,” Ms. Crider said.

James Hosking, a lawyer for Mr. Alwi, noted that his client had not been charged with any crime. “It’s time to charge the prisoners or release them,” he said.

At this point there is no reason to take the administration at its word.  If it cannot make at least some of its case in public it should not be permitted to keep detaining them.  And for God’s sake when will any of them even be charged with something?  I think we are becoming all too comfortable with (or resigned to) our un-American twilight realm.

Just to reinforce the point above, a refusal to be transparent may usually be taken as a bad sign.

Dear Ruth,

When you’ve dug yourself a hole, rule #1 is to stop digging.

Sincerely,
Dan

Alberto Gonzales dropped in from Mars to tell us that he is “one of the many casualties of the war on terror.”  What is the personality disorder that makes you keenly sensitive to your own inconvenience but indifferent to the suffering of others?

Michael Mukasey is persistently, relentlessly awful.

The Justice Department this week released Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s recommendation that President Bush invoke executive privilege in refusing to release to Congress transcripts of Dick Cheney’s conversations with the FBI.

The seven-page letter (pdf), dated July 15, argues that disclosure of such records would hinder future presidents’ ability to receive guidance from their advisers because Cheney’s conversations detailed internal White House deliberations. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee requested the transcripts along with other documents related to its investigation into the leak of former CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity.

A bipartisan committee report has already determined the claim was inappropriate, and a separate report (pdf), that the committee has delayed voting on recommends holding Mukasey in contempt of Congress. It’s unclear if the committee will ever vote on that report; a spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Congress may not ever do anything about this, but we know it can be spurred to action by matters of grave importance.  Seriously, isn’t it amazing what they allow to pass and what they will pick a fight over?

A front row seat (via) (translation) to the economic meltdown.  An amazing account.  My favorite part:

How did a market that, I thought, had really helped capitalism work in 2002 become the great destroyer of capitalism of the last two years? There were a lot of contributors to the catastrophe, but one indispensable one is that the ratings agencies monetized their sterling reputations in an extraordinary fashion, and nobody in regulatory apparatus of government saw that this was happening, and what it might portend. The success of 2002 depended on market confidence in the ratings agency process: that’s what made investors willing to buy the notes issued by structured finance vehicles that issued the credit protection that made it possible for banks to hedge. Without that confidence, the market would never have developed. And by 2006, the agencies understood just how much that confidence was worth.

Why hasn’t Moody’s been roasted over its role in this collapse?

UNPACKING JANE:  One of the most damning accusations in the book is Mayer’s reporting of how unconcerned the administration was with extracting intelligence from detainees (p.195):

Most of the military interrogators in Guantánamo were young and inexperienced, with only six weeks of training at the Army’s Fort Huachuca, Arizona interrogation course, where they were taught techniques crafted not for the war on terror, but for the Cold War.  “They had miserable, miserable success,” [Michael] Gelles the [former] Navy psychologist said.  Having worked on the Cole bombing in 2000 and earlier terrorism cases, he had been grappling with how to unlock Islamic extremists’ minds for some time.  He believed Arabs were more elliptical and indirect in their way of communicating, requiring more patience and cultural sensitivity.  He also thought the terror suspects were better understood as criminals and fanatics than soldiers, so he had little use for the Army Field Manual’s approaches, which were geared toward getting tactical information.  Military questioners were prompted to ask incessantly, and fruitlessly, “Where is Bin Laden?”  The problem, he thought, was that the military “had no understanding of the psychology of the enemy.”

This is a policy willful ignorance.  And if you thought my unwillingness to give the administration the benefit of the doubt in the first item was ungenerous here is an example of why I don’t believe they deserve it.