In March 2007, Australian native David Hicks, who was a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, became the first person to be sentenced by a military commission convened under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. At the time, critics charged that Hicks’ sudden plea bargain appeared to be the result of a political deal between Vice President Cheney and then-Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

A month before Hicks’ sentence was announced, Cheney visited Howard in Australia, where the Australian PM lobbied for the trial to “be brought on as soon as humanly possible and with no further delay.” At the time, Howard was in a tough re-election fight and Hicks’ fate was an issue in the campaign.

Yesterday, Col. Morris Davis — who was the lead prosecutor in Hicks’ trial — told Australia’s Herald Sun that he was “leaned on” by the Pentagon in a manner that “only made sense in political context“:

On the end of the line was the Pentagon’s general counsel, William “Jim” Haynes. He asked Colonel Davis how soon he could charge Hicks. The Australian had been held in custody without a hearing for five years after being picked up in Afghanistan in late 2001. [...]

The only way Colonel Davis could make sense of what he was hearing from Mr Haynes was in the context of what he was reading about the political environment in Australia. [...]

Colonel Davis says the phone calls he got from Mr Haynes and the timeline in Australia in which a “loyal ally” in Mr Howard was eyeing a difficult election and wanted to get the Hicks matter put to rest, means the nine-month sentence deal that got Hicks home has a “bad odour”..”

Davis, who has previously said that he “felt pressure to pursue high-profile convictions ahead of the 2008 elections, resigned from his position in October 2007 after he was placed under Haynes in the chain of command. Last week, Davis told the Nation that Haynes had insisted to him in 2005 that the Pentagon “can’t have acquittals” at Guantanamo because they’d “been holding these guys for so long” and it would be difficult to “explain letting them get off.”

Haynes announced yesterday that he is resigning in order to return “to private life next month.”

(HT: TPMmuckraker)

Today, House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) held a hearing on the White House’s electronic data preservation. In light of the White House’s notorious e-mail destruction, Steven McDevitt, a computer expert who worked in the administration, called its system “primitive,” creating a “high” risk that data would be lost. He noted:

– The White House had no complete inventory of e-mail files.

– There was no automatic system to ensure that e-mails were archived and preserved.

– Until mid-2005 the e-mail system had serious security flaws, in which “everyone” on the White House computer network had access to e-mail. McDevitt wrote that the “potential impact” of the security flaw was that there was no way to verify that retained data had not been modified.

In a report presented at the hearing, Waxman’s staff “said difficulties arose in recovering e-mails for Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald in the CIA leak probe,” the AP writes.

Christopher Maag does an interesting piece for Time magazine on the contrast between the Clinton campaign organization in Ohio — dominated by the patronage networks of state and local officials — and the Obama organization, which is an impressive quasi-spontaneous grassroots phenomenon carefully cultivated by the Obama campaign. The basic frame of the piece is that Obama’s approach is better, but since the voting’s not done yet, Maag’s careful to include a hedge:

“I only started calling my people last week,” said State Senator Dale Miller, a Democratic stalwart on Cleveland’s west side. “In retrospect, if I had started a week or two earlier, we would be better off now.”

Miller’s organization remains formidable, however. He spent the last few months calling hundreds of supporters, asking them to volunteer for Clinton and tracking those who seemed responsive. He visited every neighborhood Democratic club in his district at least once, filling his clipboard with new volunteers. “The people I know may not be huge in number, but they are the people who are the most active in their neighborhoods,” says Miller.

Clearly, I think, either approach could work. But what I think is interesting is the different implications for governing. If a President Clinton wants to pressure some Ohio members of congress into casting a tough vote they don’t really want to cast, she has a lot of tools at her disposal for bringing them to heel. One thing she can’t do, however, is generate pressure based on her local political organization in Ohio. After all, it’s not her organization, it belongs to the state and local elected officials and she just borrows it from them. Obama, by contrast, may have that option. And what’s more, it’s a technique that can work “behind enemies lines” as it were, against Republican members of congress whose districts don’t include any entrenched incumbent Democrats with their own organizations.

Will Obama in fact find a way to extend his campaign tools to the art of governing and political pressure? There’s no way to tell. But he might. And much like his approach to campaign, it’d be a huge game-changer. On some level, after all, it’s sort of irrelevant whether or not Obama’s outsider organizing methods are actually superior. He didn’t have the option of being the establishment candidate. What we know is that his organizing methods were effective enough and, at the end of the day, much more effective than the organizing methods of any previous presidential candidate.

Last Friday, Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ), who is a member of Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) National Leadership Team and a co-chair of his Arizona Leadership Team, was indicted for extortion, wire fraud, money laundering and other crimes. Asked that day about Renzi’s indictment, McCain said he didn’t “know enough of the details to make a judgment.”

Later, on a conference call with conservative bloggers, McCain said Renzi “would probably step down as co-chair of his Arizona campaign.” Asked in Ohio today, however, McCain said “it doesn’t matter” if Renzi stays on his campaign or not. Watch it:

McCain has been staunchly loyal to his fellow Arizonian. After the FBI investigation into Renzi was first reported in October 2006, McCain vouched for Renzi’s “integrity” in a robo-call to Arizona voters:

This is Senator John McCain. I’m calling to urge you to support my friend, Representative Rick Renzi for Congress. Rick has represented the first district of Arizona with tenacity, honesty and integrity beyond reproach.

But despite his claim that “it doesn’t matter” if the indicted Renzi remains a part of his campaign, McCain hasn’t hesitated to call for scandal plagued public officials to resign. Just last year, McCain said that both Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should step down.

Asked by a soldier in Baghdad today if there is “an end in sight” in Iraq, Washington Post military reporter Thomas Ricks replied that he thinks “we are stuck in Iraq for years to come” and that “the best case scenario isn’t that different from what some would call a quagmire.” Later in the online chat, Ricks expressed his cynicism about getting out of Iraq, saying, “I think we will be there for a looooooooooong time.”

Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) fundraising apparatus “is increasingly beginning to resemble that of George W. Bush.” The Huffington Post reports:

Through the end of January, McCain had received roughly $200,000 in personal contributions from 2004 Bush Rangers, those major contributors who each helped the president raise more than $200,000 in his reelection bid. About a fifth of that total has come in the last month alone, an analysis of campaign finance reports shows.

In addition, more than 30 of McCain’s “bundlers” — those donors who, as identified by the non-profit group Public Citizen, have pooled money for the senator — also served as Bush Rangers.

“McCain recently announced that Mercer Reynolds, the national finance chairman for Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, was going to help him raise cash.”

Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) returned this week from a trip to Iraq and was “brimming with optimism.” This morning on Fox News, Graham said he wishes Washington would be more like Baghdad:

The truth is that political reconciliation in Iraq is going better there than it is here at home because of better security.

Watch it:

Graham’s foresight on Iraq has been repeatedly off-base. For example, in August, he said the U.S. was “kicking ass” and foresaw “breakthrough” political reconciliation “within weeks, not months.” In reality, little has been accomplished since then.

So, does Graham really want Washington to function more like Baghdad? Does he want to see one political faction assassinating the other’s officials? Politically-linked murders of judicial investigators, doctors, and politicians? Sectarian bombings of civilians trying to freely practice their religion?

(HT: Alex Koppelman)