It's Enough To Make an American Proud

A reader responding to my post on what a Democratic president and Congress should do about the Bush administration’s many scandals had a pretty good idea, albeit tongue in check: Send The Decider, Cheney, Gonzo and Company to the Navy brig at Guantánamo Bay where they would be held without rights and waterboarded to see if they would yield any good intelligence.

The idea in fact has great appeal in the wake of a startling development:

Colonel Morris D. Davis, the former chief prosecutor at Guantánamo and an outspoken champion of the administration’s extralegal military commission system, has agreed to testify at Gitmo on behalf of detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden.

Davis acknowledges that Hamdan is guilty as sin, but the commission system itself needs to be put on trail because of its inherent unfairness, including the potential for rigged outcomes.

The Air Force colonel is not the first career military lawyer to part ways with the Bush administration over its perverse compunction to turn the Rule of Law on its ear in order to railroad terror suspects, but he is certainly is the most promiment to put his career on the line.

Davis' change of heart is somewhat mitigated by his reputation as a hot dog and the fact that he is nearing retirement, but it nevertheless is a salutatory act of conscience and would be deeply embarrassing to the White House if it had a conscience.