Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani announced his foreign policy team today, and included on the list as a senior foreign policy team member is Norman Podhoretz, who recently admitted with glee that his plan to bomb Iran would “unleash a wave of anti-Americanism all over the world that will make the anti-Americanism we’ve experienced so far look like a lovefest.

On Friday, Sens. Pat Leahy (D-VT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) plan to introduce an amendment restoring the habeas corpus protections stripped as a result of last year’s Military Commissions Act. The legislation would restore basic civil liberties to roughly 12 million legal permanent residents of the United States. From Leahy’s statement:

Last year, Congress committed an historic mistake by suspending the Great Writ of habeas corpus — not just for those confined at Guantanamo Bay, but for millions of legal residents in the United States. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing in May on this bill illustrated the broad agreement among people of diverse political beliefs and backgrounds that the mistake committed in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 must be corrected. This Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007 has 25 cosponsors, and the Senate Judiciary Committee passed it last month on a bipartisan basis.

Habeas corpus was recklessly undermined in last year’s Military Commissions Act. Like the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the elimination of habeas rights was an action driven by fear, and it was a stain on America’s reputation in the world. This is a time of testing. Future generations will look back to examine the choices we made during a time when security was too often invoked as a watchword to convince us to slacken our defense of liberty and the rule of law.

Contact your senators and urge them to support the Habeas Restoration Act.

Digg It!

It turns out that people really, really don’t think Bush should have commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence:

There’s got to be a campaign issue in this somewhere. It’d be nice to think the press might offer more follow-up reporting on this story than on John Edwards’ scandalously fashionable haircuts.

On MSNBC earlier today, correspondent Andrea Mitchell asked Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) about “the controvesy over the firing of the U.S. attorneys, in particular David Iglesias,” who the senator infamously called soon before he was asked to resign. “Would you testify if called by your colleagues on the Judiciary Committee?” Mitchell asked.

“I wouldn’t testify unless I am supposed to under our rules or unless I have to,” replied Domenici. “From my standpoint, I’m not going to talk about it because I want mine over with, if six senators can pass on it.”

“It has little or nothing to do with this case,” added Domenici, in reference to the President’s invocation of executive privilege yesterday to prevent his aides from testifying before Congress about the scandal. Watch it:

As much as Domenici may want to believe that he “has little or nothing to do” with the attorney scandal, in reality, he is central to it.

Iglesias’ name did not appear on the Bush administration’s prosecutor hit list until Domenici talked to President Bush in a call presumably arranged by Karl Rove. Additionally, one of the aides whose testimony Bush is blocking, Harriet Miers, is also implicated in firing Iglesias at Domenici’s behest.

On December 7, 2006, the day the attorneys were fired, Miers’s deputy, William Kelley, wrote an email to Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, saying that Domenici’s chief of staff “is happy as a clam” about Iglesias being removed.

UPDATE: Emptywheel has more here.

Yesterday on CNBC, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) attacked Sen. Jim Webb’s (D-VA) amendment that would require troops to rest for as much or more time as they are deployed, claiming that it hurts the troops. But today the Military Officers Association of America — the largest and most influential association of military officers — sided with Webb and endorsed the bipartisan amendment. (More on the Senate’s Iraq debate in today’s Progress Report.)