Rabid Hobgoblins

by digby

One day you see this:

In February, Vice President Cheney traveled to Australia to visit with his close ally Prime Minister John Howard. At the top of Howard’s agenda was a plea to release Australian Gitmo detainee David Hicks. Last Friday, Hicks became the first person to be sentenced by a military commission convened under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, accepting nine months of imprisonment and a gag order that will not allow him to discuss the case for 12 months. Howard lobbied Cheney during the February visit for the trial to “be brought on as soon as humanly possible and with no further delay.” The plea bargain itself was brokered by Susan Crawford, the top military commission official and a former Department of Defense inspector general under then-Secretary of Defense Cheney, without the knowledge or input of the lawyers prosecuting Hicks. The lead prosecutor expressed shock over the light sentence. Given the nature of the deal, suspicions are being raised that the plea agreement may have been an orchestrated gesture by Cheney to benefit Howard in his re-election fight. Howard, who is lagging behind Labor Party rival Kevin Rudd in the polls, faces a tough election contest in less than nine months. Now, legal experts on both continents are sounding alarms.

The next day you see this:

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear urgent appeals from two groups of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. The 45 men sought to challenge the constitutionality of a new law stripping federal judges of the authority to hear challenges to the open-ended confinement of foreign citizens held at the American naval base in Cuba and designated as enemy combatants.

The court’s action leaves standing a ruling six weeks ago by the federal appeals court here that upheld the jurisdiction-stripping provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. The justices’ refusal to hear the case at this point, before any of the detainees have availed themselves of alternative appeal procedures that their lawyers argue are unconstitutionally truncated, does not foreclose eventual consideration by the court after those appeals have run their course.

The men have all been held at Guantánamo Bay for more than five years, and none has been charged with a crime. They filed petitions for habeas corpus, challenging their continued confinement, before Congress ordered in the 2006 law that all such petitions must be dismissed and no new ones could be accepted for filing.

And you are reminded that the US government has gone stark raving mad. How our diplomats and businessmen and military can hold their heads up when they’re overseas, much less to make a case for American leadership, is beyond me. It must be very painful to have to try to explain just what in God’s name is going on here.

Update: And then there’s this. It seems the US has screwed up another bit of spook work, and this time it’s led to the taking of British sailors as hostages. I have to admit that I was one who thought this speech was one of his all time wierdest, and that’s saying something:

US officials in Washington subsequently claimed that the five Iranian officials they did seize, who have not been seen since, were “suspected of being closely tied to activities targeting Iraq and coalition forces”. This explanation never made much sense. No member of the US-led coalition has been killed in Arbil and there were no Sunni-Arab insurgents or Shia militiamen there.

The raid on Arbil took place within hours of President George Bush making an address to the nation on 10 January in which he claimed: “Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops.” He identified Iran and Syria as America’s main enemies in Iraq though the four-year-old guerrilla war against US-led forces is being conducted by the strongly anti-Iranian Sunni-Arab community. Mr Jafari himself later complained about US allegations. “So far has there been a single Iranian among suicide bombers in the war-battered country?” he asked. “Almost all who involved in the suicide attacks are from Arab countries.”

It seemed strange at the time that the US would so openly flout the authority of the Iraqi President and the head of the KRG simply to raid an Iranian liaison office that was being upgraded to a consulate, though this had not yet happened on 11 January. US officials, who must have been privy to the White House’s new anti-Iranian stance, may have thought that bruised Kurdish pride was a small price to pay if the US could grab such senior Iranian officials.

What an excellent idea. I wonder which secret prison they’ve stashed them in?

Has there ever been a president in history that you so wished didn’t have access to military power? Not only is his every policy exceedingly stupid, he seems to mess them up in ways that make that bad idea seem good by comparison to what he actually does. I’ve never seen anything like it.

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