As to the 30,000 hours – these are presumably attorney hours, and can therefore (IMHO) be divided by at least 3 to get a more accurate figure for time spent on a particular question.

It’s always been an administration run for political, rather than governmental purposes, which matches the ideology-without-talent (other than bureaucratic finagling) brought to it by Cheney, and the bored dilettante that is Bush.

It runs on the schizophrenic notions that the government’s substantive purposes – delivering the mail, collecting taxes, ensuring aircraft are inspected – manage themselves; they needn’t be nurtured or led, nor need mistakes be corrected. On the other hand, all substantive purposes should be bent to partisan gain – only Republicans should benefit from them. Anything else is aiding and abetting “the enemy”; an idea somewhat at odds with Lincoln’s description of a government by, for and of the people.

It’s third personality is its notion that there’s nothing government should do for a dollar that could not be outsourced to the private sector and done for ten dollars.

This is a government where only the top 3-5 individuals’ opinions matter. Where decisionmaking is so stovepiped that a deliberative or interagency process doesn’t matter beacuse it is only used as window dressing, if that.

My point was only to point out that, by all accounts, the Administration has a fully staffed Congressional letter writing and answer operation, yet they’re crying foul that they’re just too busy.

They just need to be more specific and say that Addington and Cheney are too busy to inspect Congressional responses for grammar, punctuation and smells. ‘Cause you know they do.

Super busy, people, the one or two or three who can respond to Congress, huh? Yet let’s not forget that the Bush White House changed the rules so over 450 White House staffers alone can interact with DOJ. Under Clinton, the number of White House staffers authorized to do so number was four.

But that irony aside, most agencies employ large #’s of people to respond to Congressional inquiries. Some are politicals, some career. So I had a look today for the unfilled career slots on the government HR site, USAJOBS at OPM. The career slots are usually called “Congressional Affairs Officer” and are usually GS-0301 slots. Here’s what’s open (DC area real jobs, not the endless “posslble” military listings with the Air Force):

NARA – 1
Army – 4
Commerce – 2
Interior – 7
DHS – 8
VA – 3
HHS – 6
USDA – 6
CITC – 1
Justice (Marshals’ Service) – 2

Two jobs, all in the Marshals’ Service. Doesn’t sound like there’s a crisis – otherwise they’d be hiring, right?

What about politicals? Well, from the Plum Book, we’ve got about 8 people in the Legislative Affairs Office, and another 13 Public Affairs/Press types. So between not hiring career staff and a team of 21 press/leg affairs people, 5 requests a day is too much?

Don’t think so.

Even if you buy that the CPA could somehow issue orders that were binding on the nation after the Hussein regime was overturned, what you had was Bremer’s CPA order as the sole grounds for Iraq not having jurisdiction over crimes committed there. But with the adoption of the “interim government” in Iraq, the CPA supposedly went away. Well, someone was thinking there, and they put into effect a bridge, an “administrative law” that the interim authority adopted immediately and which incorporated all or most of the CPA orders, including the one giving jurisdiction to the nations that provided the military and contractors.

So now you had a questionable authority CPA with a questionable authority order that acted kind of like a SOFA, but broader – and a questionable authority “interim govt” taking the hand off to put those orders into a questionable authority adminsistrative law.

But even if you nod along with all that, Iraq then actually passed a constitution and set up its own govt. At that point, you began to have the first truly “legal” govt in Iraq. And what the democratically passed Constitution did was to pull a couple of provisions out of the administrative law (primarily relating to Kurdish law and Kurdish autonomy) and then the Iraqi Consitution specifically disavows and voids anything else in the Adminsitrative law. And no one bothers to put in anything, anywhere, about abdication of jurisdiction. Not only that, but there are some Constitutional protections granted to the Iraqi people that are not consistent with the CPA order.

Around that same time, people are asking Rumsfeld and others about a SOFA and they are saying that it would be too politically difficult to have the Iraqi parliment, as one of its first acts, enter into a SOFA that abandons some of its sovereignty claims. So they all sit back and I guess rely upon the fact that, practically speaking, Maliki won’t do anything. And a lot of press talks about the CPA order getting adopted into the administrative law, but I haven’t seen any that discussed the Constitutional revocation of the administrative law.

At the same time, US forces have no problem turning over people they WANT to for trial in Iraq, preferably a trial in front of an Iraqi judge who relies upon the US forces pressing the claims for his personal safety.

Here’s another Horton piece on that topic. Judicial Bamboozlement.

Some of all of which ties back to Mad Dog’s link about a National Security Court (a concept Goldsmith hacks like a snake oil saleman, as something to help the Republican party). We have no real legal policy, structure, rules, etc. Just political shell games, depending on who wants someone tortured or not.