kindasorta further to your thought there –

You know in May, when Bradbury was auditiioning with his torture memos, something else was going on too. Flanigan, who seems to have almost fled from being Bush’s deputy counsel in Nov 2002 to go join the Saints Brigade at TYCO, was being brought back and offered up to be DAG.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..01362.html

Officials have said Flanigan was involved in some of the most controversial decisions to come out of that office after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, including the finding that the Geneva Conventions’ protections did not apply to suspected terrorists captured on the battlefield.

Coincidentally, Nov 2002 is when Priest reports the CIA had a torture death by freezing and tossed the “young detainee” in an unmarked grave and went on.

In any event – what is more interesting to me than his drafting input is what Mayer gives us as his “fact witness” input on a pretty important fact. Sometime in the “late summer” of 2002, the CIA sends an expert to GITMO to try to figure out why the intel from there is so bad. [Apparently a lot of the London chefs and kids who do tomato runs and crazy old men in walkers and wheelchairs didn’t even have good stuff to make up – go figure] They get their answer – that a lot of the people there have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.

And the analyst prepares a report. That means there should be something in writing and that would be a helluva important report.

Anyway, Mayer says that Bellinger sees the report and gets a little worried about the fact that we seem to be randomly kidnapping/purchasing people and shipping them out of country to GITMO for human interrogation experimentations, as opposed to rounding up al-Qaeda. So he calls in a General (????I can’t remember the name now, I’m horrible with names, but he was a NSC consultant on terrorism and ex-CIA) and they get briefed directly by the analyst. Bellinger calls up Gonzales, gets and appt for he and the Gen to have a sit down with Gonzales, but when they show up, Gonzales is flanked by Addington and Flanigan.

That throws Bellinger, bc they are there loaded for bear on the issue of enemy combatant status for all the torture/kidnap/war crimes victims and that the President had spoken and that was the new reality and that reality didn’t change just because the people were actually innocent — if the President said they were enemy combatants, they were, no matter what the facts.

Truly creepy.

But also important factually from the standpoint of the information held by the WH and the NSC when the memos were being issued (as well as for when all the court orders were being violated later).

So you had the guy who knows that the WH was informed of the innocence of multiple detainees (at GITMO, which has to have caused some questions on other detainees) and still went forward, who hotfoots to Tyco in Nov 2002, being brought back in a run to be appointed DAG in May 2005, at the same time Bradbury is issuing his opinions.

Makes you wonder what kind of deals McNulty was willing to make, doesn’t it?

And also whether or not Leahy might want to invite Flanigan to come have a confab as well. You’d almost think that someone in the WH would think it was important, as the Haynes memos were being issued, to note it looked like a bunch of the detainees were innocents sold for $$ or caught in dragnets. The kind of “relevant fact” that an architect of the “enemy combatant” theory of get-out-of-jail-free might have put to OLC.

IMO, it was put to Bradbury – and that resulted in some strong language shift in one of his memos, from high value detainees to “detainees” without qualification. That’s incredibly creepy.