The Daily Background

Washington Post reports on this:

According to the official Congressional Record of Dec. 21, 2005, Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) held a long conversation on the Senate floor about an amendment bearing Graham’s name that restricts the legal rights of detainees in the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“I agree entirely,” Graham responds to Kyl at one point. “I have just been handed a memorandum on this subject,” Kyl says later. Another Republican senator, Sam Brownback of Kansas, interrupts the two with his own commentary.

But those exchanges never occurred. Instead, the debate — which runs 15 pages and brims with conversational flourishes — was inserted into the Congressional Record minutes before the Senate gave final approval to the legislation.

[…]
The briefs filed in support of the government do not make clear that the Graham-Kyl debate was manufactured. In their friend-of-the-court brief, filed in February, Graham and Kyl note that the “Congressional Record is presumed to reflect live debate except when the statements therein are followed by a bullet . . . or are underlined.”

The Graham-Kyl exchange is not marked in either way, although a C-SPAN recording and other records make clear that the discussion never happened.

[…]
David H. Remes, a Washington lawyer who has helped Hamdan’s defense team, called the colloquy “outrageous.”

“This colloquy is critical to the government’s legislative history argument, and it’s entirely manufactured and misrepresented to the court as having occurred live on the Senate floor before a crucial vote,” Remes said.

Pffffffft. Ridiculous. Full article.

Filed under: Supreme Court, Z-TDB Blog