The Fraud Perpetrated on the Supreme Court by John Kyl and Lindsey Graham

In the wake of the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision, John Dean revisits the blatant scam that Kyl and Graham tried to pull in an amicus brief they submitted to the Court. Congress had passed the Detainee Treatment Act, which basically prevented torture. But Graham submitted a last-minute amendment to the Detainee Treatment Act, the intent of which was to void the Supreme Court of jurisdiction to review habeus corpus actions brought by Gitmo detainees. The amendment was passed by the GOP majority, but Democrat Carl Levin forced a revisitation of the language. A revised amendment was passed before the bill was sent to conference, which said the habeas prohibition would take effect on the date of enactment of the legislation, and therefore pending cases - such as Hamdan - would not be affected. But Graham, Kyl, and Sam Brownback had a "colloquy" inserted into the Congressional Record, after floor debate ended, which falsely implied that they had their discussion openly on the floor of the Senate, and that as such it constituted evidence of "legislative history" which completely contradicted the revised language of the bill, and supported their claim that the Supreme Court did not have jurisdiction over pending cases. And they submitted as "evidence" in an amicus brief this willfully false claim to the Supreme Court, with the purposeful intent to defraud the Court into believing the law had stripped it of jurisdiction. Fortunately, as Dean says: Hamdan's lawyers, however, spotted the hoax. In their opposition to the motion to dismiss the case, they advised the Court that the supposedly conflicting legislative history was entirely invented after the fact, and that it consisted of "a single scripted colloquy that never actually took place, but was instead inserted into the record after the legislation had passed." The brief noted, quite accurately, that this Graham-Kyl colloquy was "simply an effort to achieve after passage of the Act precisely what [they] failed to achieve in the legislative process." via Christy at firedoglake