Potatohead AG Mukasey takes on the Supremes...

Seriously Mike, I thought you were listening when the Supremes hit you with Boumediene. Habeas, bitch! It's up there in the executive summary:

Because the [Detainee Treatment Act's] procedures for reviewing detainees' status are not an adequate and effective substitute for the habeas writ, [the Military Commissions Act] operates as an unconstitutional suspension of the writ.

The permission the D.C. Circuit Court gave you to operate has been reversed and remanded. These guys are going into the federal system, or they're getting shipped back to Yemen, one.

This is what I thought anyway, until the Hamdan trial finally opened, "ending" the story of his probably illegitimate detention, fruitless interrogation and needless maltreatment. I thought we were done here.

So did Mukasey. Why shut the Commissions down for a 5-4 vote? As every Bushite has said since Boumediene, "it was a very divided decision." I mean, yes, it was divided once, into the Yea and the Nay, as all decisions are, and you lost. The A's lost the other day in New York on a walk-off hit-by-pitch, 4-3; do I now get to claim victory, saying, "it was a narrow outcome, very divided, went 12 innings." Do I get to mark that 4-3 embarrassment in the Wins column?

Foolish pride...I had ignored the pattern of judgement and judicial leg-cutting that continues to operate. The court revealed that detainees in Cuba had habeas in Rasul v. Bush. The administration had Congress then clumsily strip detainees of habeas in the Detainee Treatment Act (2005). The Supremes nullified that part of DTA; Congress wrote it back in in the MCA (2006). Now, having been smacked down, Mukasey will ignore Boumediene and have Congress try something new.

Just as the DTA and MCA were ostensibly about preventing torture and guaranteeing access to lawyers, the new shit will have some ostensibly noble goal. I don't think Mukasey's vision of "reaffirmation" applies. Some quasi-pagan public cleansing ritual, elevating Bush era crimes to the level of national religion? Not sure you want that exactly, Mike.

I am suggesting that it would do all of us good to have that principle reaffirmed [...] not that the principle itself is in doubt.

...but that the People are of dubious fiber, Chairman?

Well, since I'm already convinced that this is Guantanamo's endgame, that you're just running out the clock to avoid giving an inch of legal ground, and that you look and act like a stunned cave-toad, shocked to find a world of light and air every time you pop out of your little hole...I say bring it on...
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