Republican dogma dictates that every judicial nominee the Bush White House sends to the Senate deserves a full hearing and an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor. Fortunately, it’s encouraging to learn that there are at least some limits to this alleged rule.
Newsweek reported in this week’s issue that an investigation launched by the U.S. Southern Command has produced new details about torture and sexual humiliation of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. SouthCom considering courts-martial for four interrogators involved, and making matters worse, there are believed to be photographs of some of the sexual mistreatment.
What does this have to do a Bush judicial nominee? A lot.
The SouthCom inquiry and other prisoner-abuse investigations may derail President Bush’s pending nomination of Pentagon general counsel William Haynes to a U.S. Court of Appeals seat in Richmond, Va., one of seven that Senate Dems have said they may filibuster. Haynes was directly involved in setting U.S. interrogation policies and oversaw a Pentagon “working group” that in the spring of 2003 embraced the reasoning in a now discredited Justice Department “torture” memo.
Sources tell Newsweek that a classified version of last week’s Pentagon report refers to still-secret memos and other material that could be problematic for Haynes. These include documents reflecting strong objections from senior U.S. military lawyers to the aggressive interrogation techniques that Haynes had urged at Gitmo. Another is a previously unknown March 14, 2003, memo by the then Justice lawyer John Yoo to Haynes titled “Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants,” which tracks the analysis in the since-rescinded torture memo.
Haynes has been up to his ears in this fiasco for a long time. Last December we learned that Haynes may have secretly authorized torture for detainees at Gitmo. Now, even though senators are at each other’s throats over the “nuclear option,” one senior GOP Senate source told Newsweek Haynes’ nomination to the 4th Circuit is “DOA.”
Conceivably, the president could simply withdraw Haynes’ nomination, but that would, in effect, be admitting a mistake — which means it won’t happen. Still, knowing that Haynes is more likely to go to the federal court of appeals as a defendant than a judge is welcome news.