Thread by @steve_vladeck

On Cornyn's claim that Judge Jackson called President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld "war criminals": While a public defender, she filed a habeas petition on behalf of a #GTMO detainee alleging that he had been tortured in violation of int'l law; Bush and Rumsfeld were respondents.

Here's the petition:

scribd.com/document/55663…

Needless to say, the implication that, by filing this brief on behalf of her client, #KBJ *specifically* called Bush and Rumsfeld "war criminals" is, at the very least, misleading.

It's also worth noting that allegations of government torture of detainees like the ones in the petition have been to a significant degree borne out by subsequent investigations, including the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA RDI program:

feinstein.senate.gov/public/_cache/…

But the critical point for present purposes is that the brief named Bush and Rumsfeld in their *official* capacities — because of the offices they held, not because of any specific role they played in these cases. Indeed, it *had* to name them under the relevant procedural rules.

And when President Obama came to office on January 20, 2009, the captions *automatically* changed, so that they became [Detainee] v. Obama instead of [Detainee] v. Bush — reinforcing the point that naming these defendants officially is not a claim about their *personal* conduct.

Finally, and oh by the way, the *reason* why #GTMO habeas petitions *have* to name the President and Secretary of Defense, versus naming the government generally, is because of #SCOTUS's sovereign immunity jurisprudence and the "officer suits" exception it has carved into it.