Andy:

Wow. I was waiting for the chain to eventually get back to Judge Crawford (she was formerly on one of the military court of appeals) … she is an Addington protégé from way back (back in Addington’s days in Haynes’ job as DOD General Counsel, IIRC) and it seemed, given her intervention right over the prosecutor (then Moe Davis) in the Hicks prosecution, it seemed clear that the bus was, as usual, being driven by Cheney’s office.

Now we know what we knew already: these bastards are totally unchastened by any of the three Supreme Court cases they lost. They just never cared about any of the niceties of the law … but then, they ran the Justice Department as a political arm of their party, complete with firing US Attorneys unwilling to prosecute Democrats or who too aggressively prosecuted Republicans, so why not run the Commissions (which, after all, involve no domestic political constituency) in the tradition our new Chinese friends would recognize as consistent with the kind of “trial” they have in their own country: one without the troubling possibility of an unexpected result, such as an irritating acquittal.

Our Chinese friends, of course, are such as those we brought in to interrogate Uighur detainees our military and government has acknowledged are completely innocent, even as the government managed to get a Neocon All Star Team masquerading as a federal Circuit Court of Appeals to overrule Judge Urbina’s courageous order finding that habeas corpus is an actual, meaningful remedy and continue the cruel and open-ended incarceration of these admittedly innocent men.

As with the Hamdan verdict, it seems, there is mutual push-back between the military officers who actually take the oaths they swore to defend the Constitution of the United States infinitely more seriously than do the President’s and Vice-President’s men who took the same oath, but whose only integrity seems to be to their own self-defined power under Article 2 of the Constitution and nothing else. The military officers are simply not pleased with the charade they are being asked to play out. The judges are trying to actually follow the law; the prosecutors are actually trying to behave ethically; the defense lawyers are zealously trying to represent their clients. Needless to say, Addington, Cheney, Crawford, Hartmann, the National Review and the right-wing blogosphere are duly appalled that this Fifth-Column-in-Uniform values something stupid like their oaths and the presumption of innocence of the accused and our laws and Constitution and lets these meaningless platitudes get in the way of their duty to make the Bush Administration look good.

Amazing. There are barely 100 days left in this Administration, and in around 25, we will know who will succeed it, and yet, they play on, unchastened by universal international condemnation, unchastened even by a Supreme Court majority — of whom 3 of the majority are Republican appointees — that tells them their overreachings are out of bounds … and it seems clear they are going to try to play out these show trials for the rest of their time. Notwithstanding the Godwin’s Law violation, it does remind one of the die-hard Nazis who continued operating their death camps killing innocent people even after the War was clearly lost and there was no point to any of it.

Again, wow.

Here’s our link to the event.
http://www.campaigntobantorture.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=467&Itemid=109#10-13-08

Four former high-ranking CIA, defense department and military officials — Peter Mansoor, Carl Ford, William H. Taft IV and Donald Gregg — also will participate in the event. They will explain why they believe the president should issue an executive order that bans torture and cruelty.

Ford was a U.S. assistant secretary of state and Taft was a legal advisor to the U.S. State Department under President George W. Bush. Gregg was a national security advisor under President George H.W. Bush. Mansoor was a key advisor to Gen. David Petraeus, who served as commander of the multinational forces in the Iraq, and actively involved in the development of the “surge strategy.”

Three former U.S. secretaries of state, three former U.S. secretaries of defense and four World War II interrogators have signed the declaration as well, among more than 200 others.
http://www.campaigntobantorture.org/