Flash!!

WASHINGTON -- Jack Bauer, the fictional television character, in an appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, defended the necessity of torture to success in the war on terror groups, even as the Bush administration moved to pardon him and quash his testimony.

Bauer was disarmingly candid with the committee. When the Chair, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), opened the proceedings by lambasting Bauer's contempt for the rule of law, Bauer responded, "All that is true, Congressman. I violated the DTA, the MCA, the Torture statutes, the Convention Against Torture, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Declaration of the Rights of the Child, and the Mann Act [...]

"In a single 24-hour period, I killed seven men, one woman, and a dog; kidnapped 5 other people; shaved, electrocuted, interrogated and released 12 other people. During this period I revealed an attempt to stage a military coup in Hawaii; I assassinated the Vice President; I saved the President and the Speaker of the House; I hijacked a Capitol tour bus, and found the remains of the bomb that brought down Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane."

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) quickly countered, "You are clearly a man who believes himself to be above the laws that govern human relationships." Bauer's reply: "That's not all, sir. I am also beyond the laws that govern physics." To a stunned audience, Bauer simply opined, "I can bend time with my mind."

The administration had initially sought to restrict the scope of Bauer's testimony, then denied access to him as a matter of executive privilege, until Waxman and committee Democrats were compelled to subpoena him. Yesterday, the administration moved to distance itself from Bauer. "This is a Tom-and-Jerry hearing. Jack Bauer was a low-level freelance operator requesting limited access to enhanced techniques, who's now selling his story to FOX for millions of dollars."

Shortly after the hearing, Bauer was indicted at the International Criminal Tribunal for Broadcast Programming after judges at the Hague viewed the 5-disc first season of 24. "No international body claiming to govern the world's fantasies would dare stand idly by while men such as Herr Bauer wreck havoc on our institutions," said a three-member panel of justices.

A full presidential pardon is expected to be issued later today. Such a measure would prove conclusively that Jack Bauer exists, though it would obscure just what exactly his role was in crafting administration interrogation policy.

The question of Bauer's culpability in defining, enacting and -- as his critics point out -- hyperextending that policy, from Guantanamo to Bagram, may be moot. Yesterday evening, Bauer was sprayed with the nerve agent, sarin, and was abducted by rogue elements of the Chinese military. His precise whereabouts are unknown.

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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Exercises in the paranoid style, or, zim-zimma, who got the keys to Boumediene?

K: Indeed, what happens to detainees upon release? Will they sue in civil courts for wrongful imprisonment? Will the people who brought them to Guantanamo be prosecuted for kidnapping, like the Italians are prosecuting the CIA? Will they, as the Pentagon keeps saying, return to the battlefield?

Your point and mine, clearly, is that five detainees returning to jihad is less worrisome than the five thousand middle-class Egyptians radicalized the way Qutb was back in the day. (I did actually remember that NYT Mag piece from 2003...) The Supremes have just agreed to hear three cases involving executive branch responsibility for deprivations of civil rights carried out abroad, probably in order to shut 'em down. So the fear that former secretaries will have to pay for private school in Canada, or new rims on a bunch of Afghan Hummers is unmerited. And the 9-0 Munaf-Omar ruling makes clear that whatever the consequences of deporting a detainee, it ain't challengable.

Summary castration be damned: What Happens in Yemen Stays in Yemen. Ultimately, no one cares what these dudes do after their day in court.

The real question is, What will these dudes do in court? The administration hasn't been arguing to block the release of detainees; certainly not while they've been steadily draining Gitmo. They've been arguing to keep detainees from having access to their own lawyers, from seeing the evidence against them, or from having their testimony preserved in toto.

Torture is the weenie. This is why David Hicks, the Australian Talib, is subject to a gag order. This is why Andy Card, Karl Rove, Harriet Miers et alia refuse to obey subpoenas, risking jail rather than dent the armor of executive privilege. The administration is scared shitless of Carl Levin! They fear no mujahideen; they fear memoirs! Depositions!

This is not Syriana, it's Michael Clayton. (Check me later on Tilda Swinton intentionally modelling her character on Condoleezza Rice.) Detainees will demonstrate in court that a program of coercive interrogation originated at Guantanamo shortly after Rumsfeld signed off on it in 2002. Pre-Abu Ghraib, pre-"bad apples."

A program of torture spanning three continents and half a decade was conceived, promulgated and concealed by the executive branch. And the people subject to it now get their day in court? The goddam plane has crashed into the side of the mountain...

My concern is that this will bump us into a higher-echelon paranoia. Just as Al-Qaeda will feed on the shadow-government narrative, the Hammerhead Right will cite the Boumediene decision as evidence of the Enemy Within. At least, until these dudes testify...
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Just a thought...

What exactly are we going to do with all our detainees? That is: you can't just fake-drown a man for months and years on end and then send him back with a free plane ticket and a thanks for the memories post card and expect that that aggression will stand.

Why is this question important? The editorial board of the Dark Steer Report recommend viewing a BBC documentary by the name of The Power of Nightmares. It's a rather interesting glimpse into the structures and history underlying the NeoCon and Al Qaeda movements. Incomplete, perhaps, but enough to introduce one to Sayyid Qutb, who is the reason behind this post.

Our concern, dude, is that whatever horrors we may have inflicted on innocent men and women may be visited tenfold upon our heads. Check the story of Qutb and see that he was loud and obnoxious before imprisonment, but it was the torture that radicalized him.

Now we've got pens and planes and prisons full of swarthy individuals of varying degrees of innocense and we've mock-drowned and beaten and stress-positioned and sleep-deprived them for quite some time now. And now they may get access to the courts? What happens to these men when they go free?

Roberts insane, Part 2: Court feeds fresh meat to these vulgar brutes...

Part 1

Remember when the Protect America Act was allowed to lapse and President Bush predicted imminent terrorist attacks if Verizon couldn't build illegal wiretap aqueducts? Once again, there's huffing about the inevitable violence that will ensue when Gitmo detainees get habeas rights. Nino, for instance predicts, "devastating" and "disastrous consequences," and gave us an instant classic:

"It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."

So what's up with the gift given along with the whipping? The 9-0 ruling in another combined detainee case holds that Omar and Munaf -- American-Jordanian and American-Iraqi dual citizens -- can challenge their detention by the American military, but cannot challenge their transfer to another country, in this case Iraq.

Shouldn't we have expected Roberts to argue against granting the men habeas at all, since the terrorist threat posed by them is so grave? No, they're citizens. So they have to be denied the right to petition their government for wholly other reasons, viz.:

"Iraq has a sovereign right to prosecute them for crimes committed on its soil, even if its criminal process does not come with all the rights guaranteed by the Constitution."

Again, there's a nested issue. The Court has essentially legitimized extraordinary rendition, opened up a defense of the CIA's secret prisons, and taken the first step in denying challenges to repatriation to countries that practice torture.

Allowing a detainee to challenge his capture is moot once he's been transferred. The message the court has sent, by saying that a habeas hearing for a transferree cannot result in review of his transfer, is "export these guys quicker!"

No-challenge transfers can work in reverse as well. Imagine Muhammad Rahim challenges his detention at Guantanamo on two grounds: one, he wants a habeas hearing in federal court; two, the CIA tortured him in Afghanistan in order to get the confession that sent him to the tribunals at Gitmo.

According to yesterday's decisions, Rahim would win the former point, but lose the latter, as surely the CIA's transfer is essentially a military transfer to a third country. If the transfer is legal, whatever happens at the other end is irrelevant. Disappeared.

If military transfers are unimpeachable, current detainees cannot ask not to be repatriated, even if they face torture at home. So quick folks, get Abdul Rahman back to Tunisia before the D. C. Circuit holds a habeas hearing!

Finally, the no-challenge military transfers closely parallel INS procedures for deporting illegal immigrants. Like something out of Bagram or Bucharest. Dark Steer awaits the day when this decision is cited to permit INS to drug deportees before shipment...what happens in Bagram stays in Bagram...

"Pre-flight cocktails" for everyone!
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