Thank you, Brent, et al.

He is to be commended, to put it lightly, and his firm should share for their willingness to allow Brent to continue this work. If he doesn’t do it, who will?

Perhaps it’s just that you are owned/controlled and your thoughts have been classified/redacted too. Of course, if that were the case, the fact of that classification would be classified, so you wouldn’t know about it.

Are you getting the picture yet?

And by the way… ummm…uhhh… Damn, I knew what I wanted to say a minute ago.

TA (The law is classifed so you can’t know about it. Shorter: the law is not the law)

I was having the same thoughts as you, and the only thing I can come up with is this. The abuse of power of the Bush administration was so complete that it has infected and corrupted the majority of the people in the US security and intelligence gathering system. But the new administration believes that it does need this system to work for the purposes it was created, protecting the people of the USA. The truth might destroy so many people in the system it stops working.

This is no justifiaction, but it probably is the reason. It suggests getting the security system back to a pre-Cheney state may be a long and painful job.

I’ll watch with both sympathy and anger.

Ultra vires, illegal, embarassing — “I’ll take things that cannot be properly classified for 100 Alex”

Man you got that right.

There is a telling long redaction that is followed by this unredacted statement: “This information is plainly exculpatory: it makes clear that Petitioner was not who the Government touted him to be, and further, that the Government realized this only after sadistically torturing him.”

And oh yeah, that predicate in Yoo’s memos for the torture to only be authorized if Zubaydah was a high level Al-Qaeda Operative — I guess it wouldn’t do well for Gov torturers to have it come out that the facts they told Yoo existed and which were required to exist for reliance on the opinion … didn’t exist

.

Ditto.

I guess the DC cowboys are replacing the, “Save a horse, ride a cowboy” stickers with a newer, “Save a torturer, classify a victim” version.

Ouch, that’s gonna leave a mark.

The government cannot legitimately use part of these diaries to prosecute this man while forbidding the defense from seeing the portions it intends to use or the portions it would keep “secret”, and which may contradict or put in a less damning context the parts it chooses to use.

The thought process leading to this “legal” position is from the worst Kafkaesque excesses of Soviet and Communist Chinese regimes. It is something out of the Court of Star Chamber and the Inquisition. It assumes the medieval king’s right to do as he pleases because he is king, which makes him right. The Bastille was filled with prisoners held on such whims; it was an emblem of and reason for the demise of the ancien regime.

Why would a modern day, post-Enlightenment government resurrect such arcane reasoning, so antithetical to the history and myths upon which this government and nation are founded? Is it only because its leadership wants to protect itself from being sent to the same dock?

Gov argues that if Petitioner’s counsel is given access to info bc of security clearances, then even if that info is already out in the public arena in public articles and papers, Petitioner can’t cite to those public sources. I guess because one Petitioner’s counsel are told about a “classified” piece of information, Gov own all thoughts on that piece of information, even clearly public information.

I think something like this applies in the United Kingdom. An Anglo-Saxon habit, I suppose.

How is Mr. Zubaida supposed to defend himself and how are his attorneys supposed to represent him under these conditions?

The answer is, they’re not. The government, like the French Army prosecuting Capt. Dreyfus, can only accept conviction. Conan Doyle succinctly described the thought process, though in another context altogether:

[W]hen you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.