Extra?

October 8th, 2007

Thanks to the radical coup in the USA, we’re suffering an extended period [and painstaking discovery] of “extra-legal” and “extra-constitutional” interpretations of law … and since they’re most often secret, we find out about them after the fact, and are then asked to eat them … shut up and mind your own business, citizen [and go shopping.]

You’d think that Congress would rip the Executive three ways from Wednesday, considering Dubby has all but made their jobs irrelevant. But life in the Village [as the pundits call all incestuous doin's on the Hill] is as cloistered in its way as is the isolated and bubbled GWB, talking to himself in his head and thinking it’s God. Perhaps they’re “extra-institutionalized” — just turning with the cogs and unaware of their fate as the public anger collects into underground magma; or maybe they’re “extra-compromised,” with various of the Pubs carrying a treasure map to their past skeletons in their coat pocket. Whatever the rationale, they’re “extra-useless,” aren’t they.

I’ve always been supportive of the process, if not the system — but now, seems to me this just leaves us all “extra-screwed,” here in the good old US of Bu$hCo. And our one guiding light, the DoJ with its [previously] clear direction of “rule of law,” is as corrupt and politicized as any other of the collapsed departments leading the Republic today.

Here’s an excellent collection regarding this challenge — focused mostly on the recent revelations about torture. More news of torture memos, a NYT editorial, Legal Eagles weigh in, Ralph Nader asks where all the lawyers went, Andrew Sullivan argues passionately, and a couple of op/ed’s that won’t tell us anything new but illustrate how the news is getting out, finally, into mainstream area’s.

I’ve added a couple of bonus reads at the bottom, a little “extra” to this Extra post — do read them to get the nuance of this time frame [part of our current "rethink."] The first is a link to a Washington Post front page article on what’s going through the minds of those who’ve fled the Oval in the last months … how they see themselves; there appears to be a bit of depression going on there, as they ponder their “legacy.” DUH!

And the last piece is brilliant — of all the Dubby’s “mouthpieces,” the newbie on the block, Dana Perino, has already earned her chops as a Bushie Kool Aid Kid. And I thought FOX graduate, Tony Snow, couldn’t be beat for snip and NeoConniving… I was dead wrong. The tougher the crunch to the administration, the more they’ve put up their dukes and called on their dedicated clones, and this time they picked a fluffy bunny with a forked tongue, Rush’ian style — it will probably earn her the Medal of Freedom.

Jude

More Torture Memos
The Bush administration’s secret legal decisions defy Congress and the courts.
Washington Post
Sunday, October 7, 2007

PRESIDENT BUSH said Friday, as he has many times before, that “this government does not torture people.” But presidential declarations can’t change the facts. The record shows that Mr. Bush and a compliant Justice Department have repeatedly authorized the CIA to use interrogation methods that the rest of the world — and every U.S. administration before this one — have regarded as torture: techniques such as simulated drowning, induced hypothermia, sleep deprivation and prolonged standing.

The New York Times reported last week that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued two classified memos in 2005 to justify techniques that the Central Intelligence Agency had used when interrogating terrorism suspects abroad — and to undercut a law passed by Congress that outlawed “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” Those opinions form part of a continuing pattern, beginning in 2002 and extending until this past summer, of secret — and highly questionable — legal judgments by Bush-appointed lawyers intended to circumvent U.S. law, treaty commitments, legislation passed by Congress and Supreme Court decisions — all of which should have prevented the abuse of prisoners.

The administration has essentially been operating its own clandestine legal system, unaccountable to Congress or the courts. The resulting violations of basic human rights have cost the country incalculable prestige abroad and put its own citizens in danger of being subjected to similarly harsh treatment. That is particularly true since July, when Mr. Bush signed an executive order that allowed the CIA to resume using “enhanced interrogation techniques” on prisoners after a hiatus of more than 18 months.

For nearly six years, Congress has failed to take effective action against these abuses. Predictably, lawmakers are now calling for the administration to release the two Justice Department memos from 2005. Fair enough, but the relevance of those documents has been diminished by last year’s passage of the Military Commissions Act, which contained new, if inadequate, strictures on prisoner treatment. Mr. Bush’s executive order of July was tailored to that law; while some techniques, such as simulated drowning, have been dropped, others are again in use.

The president said Friday that congressional leaders have been briefed on those techniques. Those legislators should be raising objections to any that appear to violate the Geneva Conventions’ prohibition of “humiliating” or “degrading” treatment and demanding to see the latest legal memos. Even better would be for Congress to curtail further abuses by mandating that the Army’s interrogation manual, which now covers treatment of all prisoners in the Pentagon’s custody, cover all other foreign detainees.

Torture will probably be a prime topic at the confirmation hearing of attorney general nominee Michael B. Mukasey — and rightly so. Mr. Mukasey should be pressed for a commitment that the Justice Department’s guidance about current CIA interrogation techniques will strictly apply U.S. statutes and Supreme Court rulings — and that he will share that guidance with Congress. He also needs to be asked about how, if confirmed, he plans to rehabilitate the Office of Legal Counsel. Once valued for its ability to give independent and unfiltered legal advice to the executive, the office has deteriorated under Mr. Bush’s leadership to become the equivalent of a legal yes man. This dishonors its proud tradition and removes a desperately needed internal check on executive excesses — especially in an administration that so eagerly shuns the Constitution’s checks and balances. ++

Torturing Law to Death
Nancy Rapoport, Jurist
10/8/07

JURIST Contributing Editor Nancy Rapoport of the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada Las Vegas, says that the apparent willingness of US Department of Justice officials - all the way up to and including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales - to authorize harsh interrogation techniques in support of government policy raises the question of whether we are training generations of law students to parse legal language so carefully that they lose sight of the effect of their interpretations on human lives….

The recent New York Times revelation that the Justice Department authorized the CIA to interrogate suspects by waterboarding them or keeping them in 50-degree rooms has shown us just how far we’re willing to go in “interpreting” the law. In one corner, we have the very real threat of terrorism, committed by those who don’t hesitate to murder innocents in brutal ways; in the other corner, we have some lawyers (including the former Attorney General) secretly approving the types of activities that do “shock the conscience” of most people.

What concerns me is how far we’re willing to bend what is “legal” so that we can perform acts that likely fit outside the normal definition of “legal.” Are we training generations of law students to parse language so carefully that they lose sight of the effect of their linguistic cavils?

Law school teaches students that words matter, and that the smartest lawyers win by using words more creatively than do their opponents. The smartest lawyers come up with the most original types of deals in business; they pick apart the drafts of other, less-smart lawyers looking for loopholes in legislation, contracts, and pleadings; and they use their wordsmithing to eke out their clients’ best positions. In much the same way that scientists use their brains to invent new uses for nuclear power or space exploration, lawyers use their brains to invent new ways of interpreting language that often isn’t very clear.

Scientists discover things because they can — they have an innate need to take the discovered world and built upon it. Lawyers parse words because they can — we’ve trained them to split hairs, to distinguish between two cases that can look almost identical on the surface. What policymakers choose to do with new scientific discoveries takes those discoveries into the realm of good or evil (and I use those words deliberately). What policymakers do with legal prestidigitation also can be used for good or for evil.

What we don’t train law students to do is to understand that there are people behind these laws. Every time we insist on dispassionate answers in class, we chip away at the students’ vague understanding that people enter into contracts, people are the subjects of lawsuits, and people are governed by laws. We spend so much time teaching students how to deduce rules of law that we reduce people’s lives to words on a page.

What would have happened if the Attorney General had asked himself how he would have reacted to the “non-torture” of physical persuasion that fell just short of organ failure? Would he still have believed that authorizing such activities made the United States more secure? I have known an officer who survived torture in Vietnam, and I have watched Return With Honor, the story of the U.S. captives there (including his story). Their goal under torture was to provide useless information, knowing that their physical and mental pain would cause them to confess something.

We also don’t train law students to understand the pressure that they’ll get from their social settings — the need to please their bosses and their clients, and the cognitive dissonance that they’ll face when they’re asked to do something that would normally go against their normal code of ethics. We don’t warn them that it’s far too easy to justify bad conduct by inching so slowly over the line of what is right that they don’t see themselves on the wrong side until it’s too late. What’s worse is that we don’t teach them that they must say no to some of the things that clients may want to do. We say that they “may” say no, under the rules of ethics, when the client wants to do something that the lawyer finds abhorrent. We say that they must say “no” when the client wants to do something clearly illegal. We don’t teach them that they will find ways to justify illegal behavior without realizing they’re doing it—and that we’re giving them the very tools that they’ll need to justify that behavior.

There has to be a middle ground between teaching students pure law, which eliminates the need to think of the humans that it affects, and paralyzing them with the knowledge that everything they do has the risk of making someone’s life into a living hell. That middle ground has to start with an understanding that the theory that they learn in school doesn’t stay pure theory in real life, once they become lawyers. The words that they parse can make the difference between saving lives and destroying them. ++

Endgame on Torture: Time to Call the Bluff
Benjamin Davis, Jurist
10/8/07

JURIST Guest Columnist Benjamin Davis of the University of Toledo College of Law says that instead of fighting over whether or not to release newly-reported US Department of Justice memos supposedly endorsing torture, the Bush administration should simply release the Red Cross’s report on actual US interrogations of prisoners held at secret so-called CIA “black sites”…

Once again, secret memos that sanction torture are revealed - and once again the President denies that the United States tortures. The heads of several committees in Congress seek memos giving the impression that they did not know. Ranking Minority Members and the President say they did. What seems missing from this discussion is the facts. So it is time that Americans call the bluff.

In an August 16, 2007 op-ed on JURIST, I demanded as a citizen that the government release the recent International Committee of the Red Cross report to the United States on the CIA “black sites.” From Jane Mayer’s article in the New Yorker a few weeks ago, it is clear that the President’s staff and members of Congress have seen that report. From their comments in that article it is clear that the ICRC report recites the fact that torture was (and may still be) done at the CIA black sites.

An earlier report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on Iraq is available from Human Rights Watch and that report discussed some cases that were “tantamount to torture.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross is the relevant neutral entity in the world whose job is to visit persons detained and report back to the detaining country about the conditions. They are key to the system of the Geneva Conventions to help ensure compliance. Unlike our leaders and their lawyers, they know precisely what is torture and call it like they see it.

We know that torture was done by the United States in Iraq from their earlier reports. We know that waterboarding has been done by the United States to detainees at the CIA black sites. Waterboarding has been torture for at least 500 years. All of us know that torture is going on.

It is convenient for the President and others to deny there is torture. The reason is simple. Then one can accuse the people below of crimes (malfeasance) and those close to you of making mistakes interpreting your instructions (misfeasance) without suffering any criminal liability. It is an old game played in Washington for decades. The problem is that we know the President has approved all that is happening. The buck truly stops with him.

Once the ICRC report is out, a federal prosecutor should empanel a grand jury to prosecute the high-level civilians and military generals who have violated federal law. The President may be considered an unindicted co-conspirator or material witness as regards the torture. All the lower level people who have sought guidance as to what to do should be invited to testify in exchange for immunity. We should end prosecuting low-level people for doing things that higher level people organized. We should go after the higher-ups that put this criminal policy in place.

Those in Congress who went along with this can also be considered unindicted co-conspirators or material witnesses – unless the evidence leads to a conclusion that they were principals or accessories.

Let’s call the President’s bluff and the Intelligence Committees Chair and ranking members’ bluff on this rather than go through another round of back and forth with Congress trying to get memos released.

Just release the ICRC report and let us be done with the denials, obfuscation and lies. And then let us prosecute the high-level persons who put this criminal policy in place and those who planned the policy.

In the military they talk about different spanks for different ranks. It is time for the spanks to be much more severe at the higher level than they have been in the past. Or in Latin, refluat stercus. ++

An Exit Toward Soul-Searching
NYT Editorial
October 7, 2007

Once upon a time, it was the United States that urged all nations to obey the letter and the spirit of international treaties and protect human rights and liberties. American leaders denounced secret prisons where people were held without charges, tortured and killed. And the people in much of the world, if not their governments, respected the United States for its values.

The Bush administration has dishonored that history and squandered that respect. As an article on this newspaper’s front page last week laid out in disturbing detail, President Bush and his aides have not only condoned torture and abuse at secret prisons, but they have conducted a systematic campaign to mislead Congress, the American people and the world about those policies.

After the attacks of 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the creation of extralegal detention camps where Central Intelligence Agency operatives were told to extract information from prisoners who were captured and held in secret. Some of their methods — simulated drownings, extreme ranges of heat and cold, prolonged stress positions and isolation — had been classified as torture for decades by civilized nations. The administration clearly knew this; the C.I.A. modeled its techniques on the dungeons of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union.

The White House could never acknowledge that. So its lawyers concocted documents that redefined “torture” to neatly exclude the things American jailers were doing and hid the papers from Congress and the American people. Under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Mr. Bush’s loyal enabler, the Justice Department even declared that those acts did not violate the lower standard of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

That allowed the White House to claim that it did not condone torture, and to stampede Congress into passing laws that shielded the interrogators who abused prisoners, and the men who ordered them to do it, from any kind of legal accountability.

Mr. Bush and his aides were still clinging to their rationalizations at the end of last week. The president declared that Americans do not torture prisoners and that Congress had been fully briefed on his detention policies.

Neither statement was true — at least in what the White House once scorned as the “reality-based community” — and Senator John Rockefeller, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, was right to be furious. He demanded all of the “opinions of the Justice Department analyzing the legality” of detention and interrogation policies. Lawmakers, who for too long have been bullied and intimidated by the White House, should rewrite the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act to conform with actual American laws and values.

For the rest of the nation, there is an immediate question: Is this really who we are?

Is this the country whose president declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” and then managed the collapse of Communism with minimum bloodshed and maximum dignity in the twilight of the 20th century? Or is this a nation that tortures human beings and then concocts legal sophistries to confuse the world and avoid accountability before American voters?

Truly banning the use of torture would not jeopardize American lives; experts in these matters generally agree that torture produces false confessions. Restoring the rule of law to Guantánamo Bay would not set terrorists free; the truly guilty could be tried for their crimes in a way that does not mock American values.

Clinging to the administration’s policies will only cause further harm to America’s global image and to our legal system. It also will add immeasurably to the risk facing any man or woman captured while wearing America’s uniform or serving in its intelligence forces.

This is an easy choice. ++

Orwell in 2007
Robert Weiner, The Oregonian via CommonDreams
Sunday, October 7, 2007

In “1984,” the novel that most baby boomers read in high school, George Orwell creates a theoretical modern-day government with absolute power — a state in which government, called the Party, monitors and controls every aspect of human life to the extent that even having a disloyal thought is against the law.

On Sept. 26, a federal judge in Eugene ruled that crucial parts of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional because they allow federal surveillance and searches of American citizens without demonstrating probable cause. U.S. District Judge Ann L. Aiken said the federal government would “amend the Bill of Rights, by giving it an interpretation that would deprive it of any real meaning.”

Ruling in favor of an Oregon lawyer who challenged the act after he was mistakenly linked to the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, Spain, Aiken stated: “A shift to a nation based on extra-constitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill advised.”

Earlier in September, another federal judge, this one in New York, ordered the FBI to stop obtaining e-mail and telephone data without first securing a warrant. The secrecy provisions are “the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values,” U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero wrote.

In “1984,” the Party barrages citizens with psychological stimuli designed to overwhelm the mind. The giant telescreen in every room monitors behavior. People are continuously reminded of government’s surveillance, especially by omnipresent signs reading, “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.” Individuals are encouraged to spy on each other, even children on their parents, and report any instance of disloyalty to the Party — i.e., government.

“1984″ is happening in 2007.

Signs along interstate highways urge citizens, “Report Suspicious Behavior.” Cameras mounted at strategic locations monitor our everyday movement (just as in the novel). Red, orange and yellow are no longer just bright, pretty colors: They now represent levels of national security alerts. Intelligence agencies now define “chatter” as “terrorist speak.”
The Party in “1984″ uses psychological manipulation to make citizens “doublethink” — hold two contradictory ideas contrary to common sense.

Back to 2007: The Patriot Act by its very name defies individuals to disagree with it, for to do so would be “unpatriotic.”

The Patriot Act was passed hastily in October 2001, under a cloak of fear in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Some of the fundamental changes to American’s traditional legal rights include:

Establishing a huge surveillance system on millions with no court approval, without probable cause.

Holding citizens indefinitely without access to the courts or counsel.

Monitoring library withdrawals and Internet communications.

Taping attorney-client communications.

Creating a national system for citizens to monitor and report on each other, regardless of reason, including paranoia or ethnic bias.

Developing a massive computer system to monitor every purchase.

Creating a national identification card.

The new federal court rulings are a step forward against threats to our freedom — as were other recent court rulings against the Bush administration’s contention that the Geneva Conventions prohibiting torture were “obsolete” and “trite” and against our secret holding of prisoners abroad without due process.

9-11 was real, as the recent videos by Osama bin Laden confirm now more than six years after he attacked us. However, that fact does not allow playing on our fears and increasing our paranoia about our personal safety. Sen. Joseph McCarthy tried that with Communism in the 1950s. The administration has tried to condition the American people, just as Pavlov did with his dogs.

Congress is now revisiting the legality of the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance programs, torture of prisoners in secret prisons and barring detainees from counsel and knowing the charges against them. By law, in the next few months, Congress must renew, change or end the Patriot Act and surveillance programs.

Congress must act quickly or the courts should permanently strike down these presidential fear-based abuses. Americans’ trust of the federal government is now lower than during Watergate, according to a Gallup poll released Sept. 26.

Al-Qaida hates Americans of all creeds and races and will do whatever it can to destroy us and our way of life. James Madison warned, “If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.” With the mightiest military and strongest technology on Earth, democracy can stand up to terrorism without becoming the mirror of our enemies. ++

Robert Weiner was a Clinton White House public affairs director and spokesman for the U.S. House Government Operations Committee.

How the Law Lost Out to Laws of Politics at the Justice Department
Elizabeth Sullivan, The Plain Dealer (Ohio)
Sunday, October 7, 2007

The rule of law in American governance should be like post-season baseball: reassuringly ritualistic in all of its ramifications.

Partisanship has to be a passing phenomenon, like LeBron James rooting for the Yankees — an oddity to be forgotten once his feet hit the floor at the Q at the end of the month.

Constants like the nine-inning pace, the passions and the adrenaline should matter more than the fleeting fumbles or Yankees caps. That’s what baseball is, in all its glory, and why we love it and look forward to it — especially if our boys are playing in October.

The “inside baseball” of how government lawyers advise elected officials on what is lawful — or not lawful — used to be similarly unchanging.

As described by conservative legal scholar Jack Goldsmith in “The Terror Presidency,” it was a process governed by ritual and real estate.

Until the Clinton presidency, that is — when the team of smart Justice Department lawyers tasked with keeping officials’ feet out of the legal mire were no longer able to judge their high influence by where their offices lay.

Until 1993, Goldsmith writes, the assistant attorney general heading the Office of Legal Counsel worked steps away from the attorney general, literally at his or her right hand, in a next-door office suite. That year, Bill Clinton turned that space over to his pal Webster Hubbell, the associate attorney general. The pattern continued in the Bush administration when Attorney General John Ashcroft installed his chief of staff, David Ayres, in the cushy suite — and the OLC lawyers 50 yards down the hall.

As Goldsmith notes, “In Washington, geography is one of the currencies of power.” And after running the OLC for nine months in 2003 and 2004, Goldsmith, now a Harvard law professor, saw for himself how the OLC’s inhibited access worked:

The “law” became more about expedience and access and less about careful, factual opinions. A cadre of insiders, led by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and the sharp-tongued David Addington, legal counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney, were the “war council” who vetted legal opinions, in place of Ashcroft and his staff.

As long as OLC lawyers loyally stretched arguments to cover executive branch wants and potential excesses with poorly argued pseudo opinions, things piped along.

When the lawyers weren’t quite so cooperative — as happened after Goldsmith took over in October 2003 — the results were name-calling and other forms of intimidation until a new legal lapdog could be found.

Goldsmith doesn’t use the word “lapdog” in his book — probably because the lapdogs were his friends. He blames their poor legal reasoning on the constant tap of fear after 9/11 that drove many to try to stretch legal constraints to have the maximal impact on the hunt for terrorists.

He wasn’t willing to do quite the same. It turns out Goldsmith’s conservatism wasn’t political — just as his legal opinions on torture and secret surveillance of U.S. citizens and Guantanamo weren’t for hire.

Ironically, however, this “no-man” among yes-men started gumming up the works.

Even as they chafed, most officials in the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon were scared to go against OLC rulings — because of the fear of later criminal liability.

That’s what lay behind the Wednesday night hospital massacre of March 2004, when an irate Gonzales tried to bypass Goldsmith and his allies at Justice and get a very sick Ashcroft to overrule them from his hospital bed. Ashcroft refused.

Goldsmith’s book came out last month, but its immediacy was made clear last week, when the New York Times reported that his replacement, Steven Bradbury, signed off on two secret 2005 memos contradicting earlier Justice opinions.

One of them, according to the Times, approved harsh CIA interrogation techniques, including simulated drowning, freezing temperatures and head slapping, even as the White House was publicly disavowing similar measures and saying — as it continues to say — that it does not condone torture.

The question, of course, is not whether torture is allowed — clearly, it is — but to what extent the legal lapdogs of October are still redefining wrong to appear to be something right. ++

Where are the Lawyers of America?
Who Will Confront the Unprecedented and Unconstitutional Concentration of Executive Power?
RALPH NADER, CounterPunch
October 6 / 7, 2007

The rogue regime of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney-so widely condemned for its unconstitutional, criminal Iraq war, its spying on Americans illegally, its repeated illegal torture practices, its arrests and imprisonment of thousands in this country without charges and its pathological secrecy and corporate corruption-still has not felt the heat of the 800,000 practicing lawyers and their many bar organizations.

Lawyer jokes aside, the first defense outside of government against the rejection of due process, probable cause and habeas corpus should come from the officers of the courts-the attorneys of America. With few exceptions, they have flunked, asleep at the switch or loaded with excuses.

The exceptions are a number of law professors such as David Cole (Georgetown University) and Jonathan Turley (George Washington University) and the magnificent one-year presidency of Michael Greco at the conservative American Bar Association.

Mr. Greco, appalled at the outlaw nature of the Bush White House, now wallowing in the pits of the public opinion polls, organized former counsel to the CIA, the National Security Agency and the FBI, among others, to produce detailed reports and resolutions assailing the Bush government for repeatedly violating the constitution in numerous ways.

Reports were sent to Mr. Bush personally. He did not even bother to acknowledge receipt. The ABA has over 400,000 members and is the largest bar association in the world. Not even a courtesy reply from George Bush, the American Caesar.

Unfortunately, the courage of Greco and his colleagues has not been contagious with hundreds of thousands of lawyers throughout America or the 50 state bar associations who might have taken some action or position to stand after the ABA stood tall in 2005-2006.

Mind you, the climate for lawyers defending the rule of law is quite enabling. Seventy percent of the American people want out of Iraq and nearly as many would like to see this Presidency end. A poll of soldiers in Iraq back in January 2006 registered 72% of them wanting the U.S. out of Iraq within six to twelve months.

In addition, scores of former Generals and high military officers, retired intelligence officials and diplomats have openly criticized the intransigence, incompetence and harm to the U.S. national security. These leaders include the national security advisers to Bush’s father, Brent Snowcroft, the anti-terrorism advisor to George W. Bush, Richard Clark, and many others who served in high government office.

With all this in mind, I have been asking lawyers why they do not become directly active in challenging what they themselves believe is a reckless above-the-law Presidency and its enormous concentration of unlawful power. Here are some examples of their replies.

–real estate attorney with a sterling civil liberties background says “I am just too busy.”

–numerous retired lawyers of considerable accomplishment simply say they are retired.

–mid-career business attorneys say they have too many clients who might object (too much wheeling and dealing to uphold the rule of law in Washington, D.C.).

–public interest lawyers say it is not within their declared mission-eg. environmental, consumer, poverty or law reform work.

–”Too controversial,” and “I’m not up to it,” announced a prominent trial lawyer.

–”I wouldn’t know where to start and I just need my leisure time,” replied a highly specialized estate and trusts attorney.

And so it goes. Too preoccupied, too many deals in the works, too controversial, too retired

The Democratic leadership in the Congress has given Bush/Cheney a giant nod by taking a pass on holding them accountable through impeachment, through conditions in budget bills, through making them answer subpoenas by playing hardball on Bush’s nominees, such as his new choice for Attorney General.

It is up to the lawyers to rally for the Republic. This is deep patriotism, for without upholding our constitution, and the laws of the land, what will become of our country?

What will our children and their grandchildren inherit-a bankrupt government that contracts out more and more of its core functions to staggeringly expensive giant corporations seeking limitless profits, while they finance and corrupt politicians to turn their back on the peoples’ needs?

Lawyers are supposed to know how to apply law to raw power. They know how to use the courts, lobby (there are hundreds or thousands of attorneys in each of most Congressional Districts). They can cut through the arcane camouflage of legalese. They know when the laws are being violated and what the remedies are for the violators. They know how to draft legislation. They have contacts and money and are not supposed to be frightened of conflict. The super-lawyers invariably get their calls returned.

Where are the lawyers of America?

Two major terrorist strikes, with a messianic, compulsively-obsessed President, can do to America what 9 months of nightly bombing by the Nazis could not do to England-move us much closer to a police state.

Where are the stand-up lawyers of America? ++

As Bush Staffers Leave, Questions About Legacy Abound
Peter Baker, Washington Post
Sunday, October 7, 2007; Front Page

Ask Dana Perino
Marty Kaplan, HuffPo
October 7, 2007

Q: When President Bush says, “This government does not torture,” isn’t that true only because he got Alberto Gonzales to write a secret memo redefining the meaning of torture?

A: Yes. The Constitution grants the power to redefine words to the unitary executive.

Q: You’re making that up. That’s not in the Constitution.

A: Yes, it is. It’s in a secret Article.

Q: But there’s no such thing as a -

A: I see you’re not wearing your flag lapel pin.

Q: The President says he vetoed SCHIP because it’s big-spending socialized medicine. Does that mean the Republicans who voted for it are big-spending socialists?

A: Answering that would only help the terrorists.

Q: What does terrorism have to do with health care?

A: 9/11 changed everything.

Q: Dana, does President Bush agree with Rush Limbaugh that troops who don’t support his Iraq policy are phony soldiers?

A: Everyone in America is entitled to our opinion.

Q: Does the President believe he needs to ask Congress for authorization if he wants to use military force against Iran?

A: As the President has said repeatedly, all options are on the table.

Q: But does he think that the Kyl-Lieberman amendment gives him that authority?

A: We appreciate the broad bipartisan support our policy enjoys.

Q: But in a New Yorker article, Seymour Hersh says sources tell him that the Administration is already planning a military strike on Iran.

A: Every few months, Sy Hersh provides us with an excellent argument against a Federal shield law for journalists.

Q: Dana, Minnesota National Guardsmen returning from Iraq have charged that the Pentagon deliberately ordered more than a thousand of them home one day short of the 730 days needed to qualify for full educational benefits under the GI Bill.

A: The President often reminds his staff that college is overrated.

Q: What’s the Administration’s stance on Senator Craig’s refusal to resign?

A: That’s for the Senate to decide.

Q: Not even a smile, Dana?

A: Any other questions?

Q: Republican Presidential candidates are avoiding mentioning President Bush on the stump. Isn’t that a repudiation of his policies?

A: I don’t remember Al Gore campaigning on President Clinton’s record.

Q: So you think Bill Clinton will be a liability for Senator Clinton?

A: He did raise taxes.

Q: But he left you a surplus.

A: And a recession. And 9/11.

Q: 9/11 was Clinton’s fault?

A: Please don’t put words in my mouth.

Q: The Washington Post quotes a former senior official as saying that “nearly everyone who has left the administration is angry.” Is that a fair assessment?

A: If you weren’t so busy being Hezbollah’s sock-puppet, Helen, you might see how ridiculous that charge is on the face of it. Lester?

Q: Dana, isn’t the Democrats’ attempt to tie the President’s hands in Iraq a blatant interference with the powers of the Commander-in-Chief, not to mention a reminder of Senator Obama’s inexperience, Senator Edwards’ haircut, MoveOn.org’s treason, and Chappaquiddick?

A: I’m glad you asked. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves