I believed what I read, and knew Reid was capable, after seeing him fawningly lavish praise on McCrystal (among others of that ilk), but I was in fact misinformed. At least, according to Wednesday’s Congressional Record:

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Record reflect that the appointment of GEN Michael Hayden to the Public Interest Declassification Board made during the adjournment of the Senate was made by the Republican leader rather than the majority leader.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

So please substitute Senate Minority Leader “Mitch McConnell” wherever Senate Majority Leader “Harry Reid” appears in my comment at 22.

Sorry to pass the misinformation along. Apologies to all.

On another note, with a remarkable lack of noticeable “waste” of floor time, the cloture vote on Cass Sunstein’s nomination [63-35, Wednesday, with Lincoln, Pryor and Webb voting No, and Lieberman, Collins, Hatch, Gregg, Lugar, Snowe & Voinovich voting Yes], followed by the vote to confirm – due Thursday night, at the latest – quickly flew through the Senate this week (Reid filed a cloture motion on Sunstein’s nomination just before the recess).

I’m wondering (now that our friend SKIMPY has been clearing his or her throat) whether there was a JSOC instructing Military Order parallel to the civilian CIA institution authorizations. From the linked article I’m guessing no. But it seems such an obvious route to go for the unitary executive – I’m just left puzzled.

He put it very nicely – that much of what Holder et al are trying to do, trying to pull off in the torture cases, is to arbitrarily take a political defense and try layering it over a real defense (that exists, but for which the defendants can’t meet the standards) and how, if ANYTHING ends up in real litigation, it just isn’t going to work – courts don’t easily (these days, who knows) buy into the made up defense that doesn’t have a model instruction and/or a solid case law grounding.

The different setting of your case applies to the same general concept – when they start trying to have selective waivers and good faith arguments that can’t work (nmvoiceofreason made the observation about attys involved in the crimes – as with the attys drafting the proxies – not being able to be used as a reliance source).

In addition to all being a huge abuse of office, and propagating even more of a culture of corruption, cronyism and politicized prosecutions and even more politicized non-prosecutions (with conspiracies to run out statutes while evidence is destroyed) – the whole thing falls apart if anything gets to a court (as bmaz has pointed out over and over).

By specifying 2005 and not 2004, Hayden appears to be specifying those memos that specifically name waterboarding.

Oh, wait. Harry Reid – who helped make sure the MCA passed and sent Dodd and Leahy off into the weeds when they tried to coordinate with him over it.

@23 – it’s not like judges are making the decisions in vacuums either. The problem is that the prosecutorial mechanism, the DOJ, is corrupt and it won’t go after its own. There’s no real difference than having prosecutors bought off, when DOJ allows politics and personal relationships to exclude a subset of criminals – including criminals conspiring to the commission of violent crimes.

@28 – why am I not surprised?

I’d date this particular flood of sloppiness from the days of Reagan and Casey–almost thirty years ago, spanning an entire generation of bureaucrats (always assuming, perhaps in error, that the Church Committee report caused a measure of nervousness among the folks involved in Operation Phoenix and the like). If so, it may take another thirty years–another generation–to make these people fear the law. This means that the generation born around 1980 will have apply constant pressure, such that the succeeding generation, born around 2010, will know how to function in lawful ways. Call it, in the best of circumstances, a turn-around time of sixty years. But this is not as long as it sounds: the civil rights movement took a century to gather steam, and the ACLU, of such importance to this particular project, was only founded in 1920.