Update: Hicks & The Stench of Hypocrisy

I came thisclose the other day of accusing Vice President Dick Cheney of engineering the plea bargain that will spring Al Qaeda supporter David Hicks from his five-year, all-expenses-paid stay at Guantánamo Bay, the flagship hotel of the Rumsfeld Gulag, to his native Australia. That is where he will serve a mere nine months in an Adelaide jail before being released on New Year's Day.

Hick’s, the first and only Gitmo detainee to even be brought up on charges, was in line to receive a life sentence.

The veep’s hypocritical behavior is legendary, and sure enough Mr. Tough on Terrorism was so tapped into the Hicks plea bargain, negotiated after a trip Down Under where Australian Prime Minister John Howard asked Cheney to save his political ass, that Gitmo prosecutors weren’t even aware that a deal was being cut.

Instead, it was one Susan J. Crawford, a top military commission official who served as Cheney's Inspector General while he was Defense Secretary, who cut the deal with Hicks’ lawyers.

Amazing. Just freaking amazing.

More here.

And here for Kevin Drum's take. His nut graf:

[T]his case is a good demonstration of what the Bush administration has cost us. The fact is that the whole issue of enemy combatants in an age of transnational terrorism is a really difficult one. This isn't a conventional war where we can just release prisoners after it's over, nor is it like domestic crime, where the state has the power to coercively collect evidence and demand testimony. It's a helluva hard problem, and under normal circumstances we'd all be well advised to cut the administration some slack as they try to figure out how to deal with it.