http://balkin.blogspot.com/2008/06/absurdity-of-limiting-scope-of.htmlMarty Lederman
"If you're not watching the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, you ought to be. This is the first time to my knowledge that any legislators -- incuding, but not limited to, Senators Levin, Graham, McCaskill and Reed -- have really started putting together what happened in the military, have begun to express how absurd it is that high-level officials concluded that these various techniques were lawful and permissible.
The problems at GTMO, however -- and Iraq after 4/2003 -- can't really be understood without taking account of the fact that the CIA and the DOD Special Forces had previously been authorized to engage in the same sorts of abuses, and had regularly engaged in those abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, very much to the knowledge of the interrogators and officers who later considered such things at GTMO and elsewhere. From what I've seen, the Committee is working under the assumption that it may not have any public discussions of the CIA and Special Ops, because the conduct of those agencies is "classified." But that means that they're hamstrung by having to basically begin in the middle of the story, without any of the background or context.
There is no good reason that the discussion of the CIA and Special Ops stories should not be just as public and just as detailed and probing as the discussion of the GTMO and 2003 Iraq abuses. The stories are basically the same, raising the same legal questions, much of the same cast of characters, and, for the most part, the same patterns of conduct, as to similar detainees. When will the Senate start resisting the Administration's insistence that the mere designation of something as "classified" automatically means the Senate cannot have any public deliberations about it?"
From the comments section...
Morris Davis
"I am at Guantanamo Bay waiting to testify (again) on Thursday about unlawful command influence in the military commissions process. Since I have nothing to do until Thursday, I was able to watch today’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing from start to finish. Those of you who got to watch the hearings and saw the testimony of Jim Haynes probably understand why I submitted my resignation within an hour of learning that the Department of Defense chose to place me under his command and control. My ability to ensure full, fair and open trials evaporated at that moment..."http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080303/tuttle"...Now, as the murky, quasi-legal staging of the Bush Administration's military commissions unfolds, a key official has told The Nation that the trials have been rigged from the start. According to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo's military commissions, the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees to foreclose the possibility of acquittal.
Colonel Davis's criticism of the commissions has been escalating since he resigned in October, telling the Washington Post that he had been pressured by politically appointed senior Defense officials to pursue cases deemed "sexy" and of "high interest" (such as the 9/11 cases now being pursued) in the run-up to the 2008 elections. Davis, once a staunch defender of the commissions process, elaborated on his reasons in a December 10, 2007, Los Angeles Times op-ed. "I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system," he wrote. "I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively."