Bush Legacy

The legacy of Bush's legal "strategy" for GWOT is a real eyesore (and I'm not even totally opposed to military commissions!).

Item:

Now, during a March 14 speech at the London School of Economics, [Gonzales's] successor Mukasey stated that the long-delayed trials of Guantánamo prisoners—six of them to start this year—will have "all the protections [for the defendants] we regard as fundamental." But he neglected to mention one glaring, discordant fact: that Colonel Morris D. Davis, the former chief prosecutor for the Office of Military Commissions, which will be conducting these trials, resigned in protest over their lack of credibility last October.

"I resigned on that day," he wrote in a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece in December 2007, "because I felt the system had become deeply politicized and . . . I could no longer do my job effectively or responsibly." And in February of this year, Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, the legal adviser for these military commissions, refused to rule out the use of "evidence" that had been obtained by waterboarding—which nearly everyone but Mukasey defines as torture.

Item:

Central to Mizer's claim is a piece of evidence suggesting that Crawford's legal adviser, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, is so ensconced in the prosecution that he has become the de facto chief prosecutor -- a highly improper role according to observers, participants and the Military Commissions Act itself.