I wish I had your confidence that Levin’s involvement was a good thing instead of more bad, more rippling the surface to make it look like something is going on, without any sinker to take the hook down where it needs to go.

Levin co-sponsored the DTA. Even Levin agreed the DTA was meant and intended to kill habeas at GITMO, his only “later discovered” difference of opinion, which he kept as muted as possible, being over whether or not the DTA was meant to disenfranchise existing cases. He sure helped draft it in a manner that Steven had to work damn hard to have it not disenfranchise existing cases.

Levin and his crew have had case after case, whistleblower after whistleblwoer, before them – they knew children were being bought and shipped to GITMO, they’ve seen the Kurnaz case – the Uighur cases, they’ve read the appellations of Kafkaesque that Judges had affixed to those cases; they’ve had report after report of situations at GITMO and at prisons and detention facilities and Levin did not one constructive thing to address any of them. He hasn’t been a voice on any of it. He let Rumsfeld yammer on for YEARS about how only the “worst of the worst” were at GITMO without doing one thing to correct the record or call him down (and he doesn’t seem too concerned that the Pentagon is still harboring Rumsfeld in offices, or was last I heard).

Levin was ranking member and could have derailed the MCA, which took the principals that he (Levin) co-sponsored in the DTA (killing habeas) and made them universal in application. While Dodd and Leahy were scrambling before the MCA votes, Levin was finding an itch to scratch. He didn’t lead on Walter Reed – he followed. No one on the Armed Services committee was even paying attention until it hit the press. He may not be gelatinous, but the places were I have seen resolve – like his help ramming through the first set of amnesty provisions in the DTA and sounding a death knell for habeas despite having some of the most direct evidence of innocence of detainees there – they haven’t been places where his dejellification has made me feel better.

And then there’s the note that Hillary seems out of the loop about any investigation.

Keep in mind that is hasn’t just been Cheney and co. that have circled the wagons around Haynes. If Comey and Goldsmith had their way – he’d be on the Fourth Circuit.

I’d be shocked beyond belief if the primary purpose of Levin’s actions were not to clear the decks with a tsk tsk so that there will never be any actual consequences for Haynes et al. After all, how much more culpable is Haynes than anyone in Congress – in particular those like Pelosi and Reid who got torture briefings directly – who let everything go on with the sole, concerted effort of making sure no voices of Iraqi and ME victims, or their orphans left behind, or their disappeared chidlren, ever found an audience here in the US.

With the Sands book coming out, they want to give an appearance of doing something – without actually doing it. Levin worked just as hard as any Republican to make sure that Taguba’s requests for investigations into Military Intelligence never came to fruition.

OT – but while Congress is working hard at doing nothing and Mukasey is following in their footsteps, Horton has a more expanded treatment of the discussion in the link I put in an earlier thread. That was in connection with an award of about $500,000 in fees in favor of a defendant, Latifi, in a case brought by Martin’s Alabama USA office and dismissed by the court at the outset as being without basis.

Kind of like the bench ruling by the appellate court setting a Biskupic victim free, the Judge’s award in Alabama is almost unprecedented. But what helped finalize the decision was what Martin herself did. She had organized pre-judgement seizure of Latifi’s assets, putting him out of work for over a year and destroying the business he built since 1984. When the case was dismissed, he filed for fees and Martin filed a request for the court to certify the seizure as based on reasonable cause to avoid the fee request. So Latifi’s lawyers filed to put Martin under oath and to have discovery of the legal memos, notes, correspondence and investigations that resulted in the seizure.

Martin scrambled and scrambled to avoid being put under oath, but when she had pretty much lost the battle, rather than testify under oath as to why assets were seized and the reasonable grounds for that seizure – – – she withdrew motions and let judgement for fees be entered against gov.

So America is paying $500,000 just so Martin won’t have to testify under oath about her prosecutorial misconduct. Mukasey apparently is busy studying up on whether or not Spitzer’s hookers qualified as “unlawful enemy commandos” or if the wearing of a tanzanite encrusted thong (ouch) qualifies as a uniform.

46 – MD, Katyal is a pretty smart guy and so I’ll overcome my first reaction to dismiss anything that has Goldsmith’s name. But I did think that it was interesting what “motivates” Goldsmith on this front. From your link/quote:

It would help the Republicans in the fall election.”
…
“It worked very well in 2006,” Goldsmith said. “The only way the Democrats have to not make it an election issue is to give the President the powers he seeks.”

Goldsmith could give a rats ass about the families he’s destroyed, the children whose parents were disappeared, the children who were disappeared, the London chefs, the Chinese dissidents, the Germans in the wrong place at the wrong time; he helped insure they were all bound for torture and for being safely tucked away, beyond the reach of habeas, so the years and years of ongoing depravity could continue, unabated, while he tuck’s his tenure around him and sleeps like a baby at night.

He’s doesn’t care at all about the people held in concentrated population camps throughout Afghanistan and Iraq, or at Guantanmo. He wants to smugly offer up something to help the Republicans come up with a tool to use against the Democrats. I can’t really imagine how you get more repulsive.