Oh, one more thing: As of right now, a copy of the Manual isn’t at Guantanamo Bay. No one involved in tomorrow’s hearing has read it. Apparently its a very big file — inches thick if printed out — and internet speeds here are pretty slow.

Why’s this important? Because the Manual for the Military Commissions establishes the rules of evidence and the rules of procedure for the commissions — absolutely critical stuff for any judicial activity. Earlier this afternoon, Mike Berrigan, the deputy chief defense council for the commissions, bluntly told a press conference, “We don’t know what the law is” as a result of not having the Manual. Berrigan’s effective opposite, commissions prosecutor Navy Capt. David Iglesias, who claimed yesterday that the Military Commissions Act established sufficient rules, conceded shortly after Berrigan’s statement, “Reasonable people differ on this point.”

Iglesias further elaborated that if the judge sees things Berrigan’s way, “Tomorrow will be a very short day,” since the judge will simply delay the hearing until the issuance of the Manual. It bears mentioning that if officers of the court haven’t had time to read the Manual before the hearing, Iglesias’s quip still applies.

Video after the jump:

I asked Iglesias if the absence of a manual instructing officers of the court how to interpret the Military Commissions Act of 2009 — the statute governing this latest version of the commissions — would negatively impact Khadr’s hearing.”We expect the impact to be negligible right now,” Iglesias said, contending that the Act itself provides sufficient guidance for the case to proceed. “That being said,” he continued, “both sides expect there to be rules assigned very, very soon.”

That didn’t satisfy Jennifer Turner, a human rights researcher with the American Civil Liberties Union here to observe the proceedings. Federal courts have “years of experience” in interpreting statute and precedent and acting accordingly at trial, she said. The result of years of inventing the commissions, subsequent court challenges, legislative action, court challenges to that legislative action, and finally legislative responses to those challenges is that the officers of the commissions don’t have the same body of law to call upon to guide the proceedings. As Turner put it, “the problem is there are currently no rules for the military commissions.”

Well, not entirely. One rule currently in place is that whoever requests an action of the court has the burden of demonstrating the validity of its case. In Khadr’s case, his attorneys have asked the judge to suppress any statements he made during his post-2002 detention at Bagram and then Guantanamo Bay, contending that those statements describing his actions on the battlefield of Afghanistan’s Khost Provice are the result of torture, degrading treatment and coercion. So since Khadr’s lawyers filed a motion to suppress their client’s statements, “it’s their burden, by a preponderance of the evidence,” admittedly a low standard for demonstrating that Khadr’s treatment in detention represents what lawyers call the “fruit of the poisoned tree,” a legal doctrine stating that initial impropriety in extracting information renders whatever information ultimately results inadmissible in court.

I asked Iglesias, who is now part of special prosecution team for Guantanamo detainees, to respond to the specific allegations Rove makes in the book.

Former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias (Mark Murrmann/ZUMA Press)

ROVE: [Iglesias] failed to do anything about voter fraud that was so egregious that the Bernalillo County (Albuquerque) clerk, a Democrat, and the sheriff, a Republican, had both called for a federal investigation.

IGLESIAS: [Laughing] Oh, this belief that there was this endemic voter fraud. It’s absolutely true that I didn’t file a case, but that was because I didn’t have any evidence I could use to make the case. And I personally looked at the evidence that was supposed to back up these charges.

ROVE: I also passed on the complaint that Iglesias, in order to get publicity in preparation for a future political campaign, had personally bungled a high-profile corruption case involving the past and current state treasurers by interfering with the career prosecutors who were handling the trial.

IGLESIAS: Bungled? In 2005 I got the biggest fish, former state treasurer Michael Montoya, to plead guilty and cooperate with our investigation. And I got a conviction of the incumbent state treasurer, Robert Vigil, who resigned in lieu of impeachment and was sentenced to 37 months in prison. Now, I didn’t try the case, but I did supervise it. I did get back to back state treasurers to plead guilty or be found guilty at trial.

ROVE: I also forwarded claims that Iglesias had sat for months on an indictment involving charges of corruption by prominent Democrats in the constriction of the Bernalillo County Courthouse, refusing to file it until after the 2006 election for fear he would offend prominent Democrats he might need if he ran for the U.S. Senate.

IGLESIAS: That’s a complete fabrication. That indictment didn’t get filed until three weeks after I left office — in March 2007. Look, here’s where Rove’s lack of knowledge of DOJ policy hurts him factually. It’s standing policy that you can’t file an indictment right before an election if you think it will effect the outcome. But I’m sure Rove heard from local Republicans that I was intentionally keeping my powder dry. Even had I been planning a run for the Senate in the 2006 timeframe, I wouldn’t have intentionally withheld an indictment for fear of alienating the Democrats. I’m happy with what I’m doing. I have no plans to run for office.

The dismissal of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias in December 2006 followed extensive communication among lawyers and political aides in the White House who hashed over complaints about his work on public corruption cases against Democrats, according to newly released e-mails and transcripts of closed-door House testimony by former Bush counsel Harriet Miers and political chief Karl Rove.

A campaign to oust Iglesias intensified after state party officials and GOP members of the congressional delegation apparently concluded he was not pursuing the cases against Democrats in a way that would help then- Rep. Heather Wilson in a tight releection race, according to interviews and Bush White House e-mails released Tuesday by congressional investigators. The documents place the genesis of Iglesias’s dismissal earlier than previously known. [...]

The House focused most of its attention on Iglesias, a rising star in New Mexico who came to displease his political patrons. Miers told investigators that Rove called her in September 2006, “agitated” about the slow pace of public corruption cases against Democrats and weak efforts to pursue voter fraud cases in the state. In the call, Miers said that Rove had described Iglesias as a “serious problem” and said he wanted “something done” about it. Miers testified that she called then Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty to pass along the concerns.

Also, The Post reports that the debilitating amnesia that afflicted former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales when he testified before Congress appears to be contagious.

In their testimony in June and July 2009, both Miers and Rove failed to recall key incidents , according to the transcripts. Miers said she could not recall events nearly 150 times in the course of her 10-hour deposition. Rove portrayed himself as receiving hundreds of e-mails a day, so that “asking me to remember replies is like asking me to remember a raindrop in a thunderstorm.”

“It’s unclear right now,” Iglesias said about whether his new role was already irrelevant based on the president’s executive order. “Obviously, we have a new Commander-in-Chief and I’m a naval officer. How it affects the cases I’m working on, I don’t think anyone really knows, because the majority of the detainees will have to be prosecuted in some form.”

Asked whether this could signal a possible move back into his old job as a federal prosecutor — Iglesias was among those terminated during the U.S. attorney firing scandal –  he hedged.

“I really like being back in the prosecution world,” he said. “It would depend on the exact nature of that position. One of things I’ve learned over the last 10 years is to never say never to new opportunities.”

]]> http://washingtonindependent.com/26556/iglesias-my-position-is-unclear-right-now/feed 1 http://washingtonindependent.com/26532/is-iglesias-new-role-already-irrelevant http://washingtonindependent.com/26532/is-iglesias-new-role-already-irrelevant#comments Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:47:55 +0000 Kate Klonick http://washingtonindependent.com/?p=26532 If President Obama is drafting an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay, and he has already filed a motion to halt military commission trials, does that make fired U.S. Attorney David Iglesias’ new gig as a Gitmo prosecutor irrelevant?

If the Gitmo prosecutions get moved More...

A Justice Dept. inspector general report released last week concluded that Iglesias was forced to leave because he didn’t pursue public corruption and voter fraud cases that New Mexico Republicans wanted him to prosecute.

Now, 22 months after his dismissal, Iglesias said in a phone interview that the IG report vindicates his repeated assertion that he was fired for improper and possibly illegal reasons.

He also had a surprisingly upbeat assessment of where the U.S. attorney investigation will go next.

So far, neither Justice Dept. nor congressional investigators has gotten cooperation from the White House, especially former top Bush advisers Karl Rove and Harriet Miers. But Iglesias said that could change with the Justice Dept. naming a special prosecutor, acting Connecticut U.S. Atty. Nora Dannehy, to probe criminal misconduct in the firings.

“The special prosecutor has the ability to get White House documents,” Iglesias said. “If she has authority similar to what Patrick Fitzgerald [the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame investigation] had, she’ll have a lot of power.”

Not only did Rove and Miers not answer questions from the inspector general, but the White House did not turn over documents on the attorney dismissals. But Iglesias said that by specifically citing what documents were not turned over, the IG was “signaling to the special prosecutor what evidence was still out there and what was necessary.”

Iglesias is also confident that Congress’ probe into the scandal will last into the next administration.

“[Rep.] John Conyers, [D-Mi.] has made it clear that he wants to get to the bottom of this,” Iglesias said of the House Judiciary Committee chairman. A federal appeal courts ruled this week that whether Miers can be compelled give congressional testimony cannot be decided until next year.

Iglesias said he has kept in frequent contact with other dismissed U.S. attorneys since the IG report. “There’s been a lot of email chatter back and forth… we’re pretty high-spirited” he said. “The report made crystal clear that there is a small class of reasons that you cannot use to let go of a U.S. attorney.”

If the assessments of Iglesias are accurate, Alberto Gonzales and other former Justice Dept. officials may eventually face criminal charges.