Pruning Shears

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

H. Candace Gorman is “a civil rights/human rights lawyer in Chicago who is representing two Guantánamo detainees pro bono.” Here is the latest on her Kafkaesque trip through our extralegal nonjudicial system for detainees:

On Tuesday I reported that the Government finally allowed me to discuss matters that had previously been “protected” in regards to my client Al-Ghizzawi. In fact the Government unclassified and allowed for public release a Petition for Original Habeas Corpus that I filed in the U.S. Supreme Court. I released that Petition to the Public in accordance with the Government’s designation of “unclassified.” On Friday the Department of Justice (DOJ) told me that it had made a mistake and that it had apparently violated the Protective Order (an Order that sets out the rules for the DOJ and Habeas counsel in regards to the Guantanamo cases) entered in the case when it “unclassified” and allowed for public release information in the Petition that it wanted to “protect” and that therefore I must remove my post of November 17 because of the DOJ’s mistake. I explained to the DOJ attorneys that the Petition and my Post of November 17th were widely distributed and are available at various sites on the web…they do not seem to care about that ….they only care that I not report about what they are now trying to declare “protected information”…. 5 days after they unclassified the material and made it available for public release.

Leftover links from Thursday.

• Some of the critics of the KSM trial are deeply, dangerously ignorant.
• Call me a dreamer but I firmly believe that one day fact-free demagoguing will go out of style, even on the right (via).
• Even Holder’s relatively modest decision brought out the crazies, and in the end maybe he had the best response to it.
• Fortunately, it seems the crazies are pretty much just gibbering amongst themselves these days. Fear is slowly losing its grip.
• It turns out terrorism is a law enforcement issue. Remember when that was a provocative enough statement to be a major presidential campaign issue?

I’ve become a part time chronicler of David Obey’s toothless bluster, and this week he added to the catalogue with:

The inaccuracies on recovery.gov that have come to light are outrageous and the Administration owes itself, the Congress, and every American a commitment to work night and day to correct the ludicrous mistakes.

During the previous administration, all of us were critical of the president’s assertion that he could pick and choose which aspects of Congressional statutes he was required to enforce. We were therefore chagrined to see you appear to express a similar attitude.

As chairman of the appropriations committee, I have no intention of reporting out of committee any time in this session of Congress any such ([Iraq] war funding) request that simply serves to continue the status quo.

Nine law professors and 91 state attorneys general are asking for a review of Don Siegelman’s conviction. White House not impressed.

The CIA set up a torture shop in Lithuania. Now that we are starting to see actual brick and mortar structures and not just vague reports of black sites things are getting interesting - in other countries, anyway. (Glenn has the quote of the week, writing of DC conventional wisdom “government crimes should be disclosed, investigated and punished only when they occur during a time other than the Past.”)

Former Bush attorney general Michael Mukasey is a terrible human being, and it is a measure of the depths we sunk to that individuals such as him were so highly placed in our government.

This should be interesting.

In Illinois jobs trumped fear, and even some on the right have started to think maybe this whole War On Terror thing isn’t so good for the economy. It’s interesting that tax-cutting evangelist Grover Norquist is among the first of the establishment right to break with the pants-wetting conservative orthodoxy on national security. Leading indicator or outlier? We shall see.

Congress may be finding its spine on economic issues at least:

Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank and Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson will insist that foreign exchange derivatives be subject to the same transparency and accountability rules as other derivatives. The legislation as proposed by the Obama administration had exempted them.

The Weekly Standard will go down with the fearmongering ship. Its last words will be “they’re all GOING TO KILL U…glug glug glug.”