Have you seen THIS?

I knew you'd get to this sooner or later, LB.

I did see that, and CharleyCarp emailed me about it as well -- I just left it so long that if I'd credited everyone who got to the story first, the post would have been all links.

I'm surprised more people didn't say "McCarthyism", though. If there were ever a witchhunt, this is it.

This is lovely news too.

Oh, I wasn't fishing for credit. It was just something that, as I was reading it, I was thinking "can't wait to see what LB says about this."

But now that you've brought it up, I'm strongly considering feeling peeved at you for failing to credit me.

I'd get outraged but I'm at the red-line already. History, or at least the dumbest events in history, do indeed repeat themselves, and what's worse, often within one person's lifetime. I watched the Army-McCarthy hearings, arguably the start of Joe's downfall. We need another version of this, taken from Wikipedia:

"Until this moment, Senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or recklessness...."

When McCarthy resumed his attack, Welch cut him short:

"Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator.... You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

Stimson is deplorable, but I don't really think that anyone sane is on his side on this issue. Not even the government. I was shocked when I read this, though, at the sheer gall of implying that the detainees don't even deserve representations, nevermind the fact that they don't have, you know, any right to be heard in court.

I have met at least fifty of the lawyers that are doing this work, and I hope for their sake that this doesn't get any further than Stimson's ridiculous comments. Speaking of which, I'm coming to New York again for some related work on the 25th of January. LB, will you be free this time? Other notable absences from the last me-meetup in NYC that I would like rectified: AWB!

I really would like to see Stimson face serious professional consequences for his public displays of buttheadedness, though.

Excellent! I should be around, barring work misbehaving itself.

Stimson is deplorable, but I don't really think that anyone sane is on his side on this issue. Not even the government.

I don't know about sane, but there was the simultaneous op-ed in the WSJ, which suggests that there was some attempt at a campaign rather than Stimson just losing his mind.

But I think the reaction it's gotten should have killed it.

I especially liked the barely-subtle barb at the end of the NYT article:

In a 2006 interview with the magazine of Kenyon College, his alma mater, Mr. Stimson said that he was learning "to choose my words carefully because I am a public figure on a very, very controversial topic."

Heh.

Stimson is deplorable, but I don't really think that anyone sane is on his side on this issue. Not even the government.

Don't believe that, at all.

Maybe it's a hopeful sign. One wouldn't be worried about the firms representing detainees if one believed they'd be kept out of court.

I mean "hopeful" in the "this administration will lead me to take up chain-smoking to calm my nerves" sense, natch.

Well, what about this?

In an interview on Friday, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said he had no problem with the current system of representation. "Good lawyers representing the detainees is the best way to ensure that justice is done in these cases," he said.

Neither the White House nor the Pentagon had any official comment, but officials sought to distance themselves from Mr. Stimson's view. His comments "do not represent the views of the Defense Department or the thinking of its leadership," a senior Pentagon official said. He would not allow his name to be used, seemingly to lessen the force of his rebuke.

That's promising, at least. Would the government be happier if no one was representing the detainees? Sure. Do they have any reason to think there's even a possibility of that being the case? Not really.

Call me naive, but it's just such a ridiculous position that I can't imagine wholesale adoption by the government, that we should skewer law firms for taking on pro bono cases, for fuck's sake. Particularly when there are plenty of law firms getting paid by clients to defend them against much worse charges (like, say, corporations being sued for genocide under ATCA).

7: Definitely, let's rectify this. I'll be around!

I doubt this witchhunt stuff will be very effective at this point in the public-opinion turn. I think we've seen enough of the desperate attempts to freak out the public about enemies in our midst that even the most gullible are starting to recognize them for what they are.

"Good lawyers representing the detainees is the best way to ensure that justice is done in these cases," he said.

That should read, "The Democrats won the '06 elections, and might well win the Executive in '08. I'm scared." After all: "Padilla now faces charges far less substantive than the allegations the Bush administration cited to justify keeping him in near isolation without charging him and without access to legal representation for much of the past three years: that he planned to disperse radioactive material through a dirty bomb detonated inside the United States." And that's an American citizen. If there were a way to exile these fucks that was consistent with our values, we'd have a moral obligation to do it.

That's the thing about trying to run a police state -- it takes a lot of fucking resources to do it, resources that could be spent on something else.

One could mention similar situations -- for instance, I know that the Iraq War is constitutively impossible, but still, it seems bizarre to me that there were even soldiers available to enact these perverse tortures on prisoners in Iraq. Torture takes time! Every half dozen troops forcing a naked Iraqi to stand on a box while throwing used tampons at him are a half dozen troops who aren't, say, guarding the National Museum.

A lot of times a guy puts an idea out there only to have it immediately disavowed. It's a form of bluffing and intimidation. It's still scary. Putting a bug in everyone's ear (and this has apparently been coordinated with winger radio.)

this AP artice names the spokesperson doing the rebuking, so I guess that's good news?

I agree with delusional paranoid Emerson: the point is to put this in play as an issue; it'll go away this time, because it's outside the bounds of acceptable policy, but next time it will be "another lawyer believes...some people agree...gaining momentum...etc."

It's a fascist trial balloon: coordinate big industry (corporations hiring these law firms) with the right-wing forces in government against those who try to help maintain a semblance of due process and the rule of law. Exactly the kind of thing that flowers in the fever swamps of talk radio (per Emerson), scary coming from a fairly high-ranking gov't official.

18, 20: I read this as a shot across the bow. Not so much towards corporations as to the law firms. Plenty of firms have long and proud traditions of pro bono work; it's also plenty easy for one or two well-placed lawyers in those firms to ask themselves "Is this really the right pro-bono case for us to take on?" next time it comes up.

I saw this not out of any deep inner knowledge of law firms, but from a intimate experience of the structural conservativism of another type of instiutution. Private foundations -- rich, financially independent, and ostensibly beholden to no one except their own boards -- routinely self-censor in a hypervigilant attempt to ward off the mere appearance of being improper.

One of the most difficult things about GWB right now is that it's almost impossible to voice a concern about executive power grabs without sounding reflexively anti-Bush. I got my head handed to me on a platter after one such (tactfully phrased) statement. I don't know how else to say it except baldly: YES, I would be just as vehemently opposed to these manuevers if it were Hillary Rodham Clinton -- or heck, Dennis Kucinich.

I got my head handed to me on a platter after one such (tactfully phrased) statement.

By whom? Your boss? That sucks.

23: No, luckily it was someone I don't have to see again. Still, I was really taken aback. Actually, I was stunned. I had to go back and re-read my e-mail to make sure I hadn't said something quite different than I remembered.

I take the "he doesn't speak for us" comments as signs that this has backfired & it's not worth it politically, and no more.

DOJ has argued in federal court that:
1. it would be constitutional to hold an enemy combatant based on evidence obtained under torture even if he was a US citizen.

2. people who give English lessons to the relatives of al Qaeda members could be indefinitely detained without access to counsel as "enemy combatants", even if the teacher had no idea that their student had any connection to terrorism

3. Maher Arar waived the right to sue the gov't over his rendition to Syria because he had 30 days immediately after his deportation to file a challenge, and he carelessly allowed the deadline to pass.

That's in federal court. In talk radio interviews, press conferences they show considerably less shame, when they think they can get away with it.

So I think Stimson definitely spoke for the administration--but they backed off in light of the strong reaction. In a way that's *more* encouraging.

Imagine a law firm during WWII volunteering to represent Nazis caught on the battlefield, and held in Europe. Imagine what their clients would say when they found out about this. The canons of ethics say NOTHING about having to represent the enemy pro bono during a time of war. These detainees do NOT have the rights that a criminal defendant has in our country, and efforts to create those rights for these killers is beyond belief. I believe the strong reaction from the usual yentas is a bit too much protest. I think they realize, deep down, how creepy it is for corporate lawyers to be volunteering to free non-citizen, non-state-affliated Jihadists that would love nothing better than to detonate themselves inside Shearman and Sterling's New York offices. The whole thing reads like an article from The Onion!

One thing even this page cannot deny: the people paying the law firms have a right to know what their lawyers are doing in this field, and they have a right not to pay for it if they don't want to. I would love to hear the argument against that.

I believe baked goods are appropriate now.

Imagine a law firm during WWII volunteering to represent Nazis caught on the battlefield, and held in Europe.

First I'd like to imagine if you had proposed a relevant scenario…very interesting. On the other hand, the intuitions you're attempting to exploit here are pretty strong, and I believe were the basis for the Allied decision to kill the top Nazi brass that had been captured at the infamous Nuremberg Executions.

the people paying the law firms have a right to know what their lawyers are doing in this field, and they have a right not to pay for it if they don't want to.

So your theory is that the clients of these law firms are getting charged for work on cases other than those for which the firms were hired?

Jihadists that would love nothing better than to detonate themselves inside Shearman and Sterling's New York offices>/i>

Sir, your knowledge of the jihadists' priorities makes you suspect. Or, is it that you know they hates us for our freedoms and that among those freedoms is due process and thus the jihadists hate S&S for the very pro bono work that you despise? So like D'Souza you maintain we can buy peace by surrendering freedom. You sir, are a knave and a fool.

For once I am glad that formatting gets reset in a new paragraph.

In light of the bizarre reference in 26: I'm sure a bunch of "yentas" like us deserve at least a nice babka. Preferably chocolate.

Damnation. Motherfuck got me gritting my teeth so hard I forgot my cases. Pretend I said "'yentas' such as we".

(er)

That's it, I'm going to bed.

Imagine a law firm during WWII volunteering to represent Nazis caught on the battlefield, and held in Europe.

Imagine that before we executed Nazi leaders, we first convicted them in an American style trial complete with defense attorneys.

Hypothetically, Steve R:

1) imagine that none of the German army members we captured were wearing uniforms. Say that instead of US troops taking captives, they had decided to offer thousands of dollar rewards to locals--"wealth and power beyond your wildest dreams; feed your whole village"-- for the surrender of all "Nazis" in countries full of desparate people and unscrupulous gangsters.

2) Imagine that some of these captives turned out not to be Nazis at all, but civilians from other countries who had been taken frm their families at gunpoint and forced to work in German factories at pain of death--people who never carried a weapon and would have escaped if they were not under guard.

3) Imagine we caught someone in Canada or England, in a courthouse where he had been tried for collaborating with the Nazis but completely exonerated or acquitted on all charges. We arrested him outside the courthouse, and sent him to a prison camp.

4) Imagine that we caught one group of prisoners at a concentration camp--not a death camp, but a horrible prison where they had been tortured as suspected spies for the Allies and where many prisoners had starved. Imagine we decided that they were Nazis.

5) Imagine there was another prisoner who was found to be a Nazi soldier even though he kept saying in Yiddish that he was Jewish and that the Germans had burned his village (naming a specific village in Czechoslovakia that had in fact been destroyed) and killed his mother.

6) Imagine that after the US gov't told the US public for years that these were all high level SS members, some of them turned out to be 12 years old, or 80 and missing a lot of teeth, or to be severely mentally ill.

7) Imagine that we told all of these people that they were not POWs, and that in fact no law protected them at all. Imagine that not only prisoners, but soldiers and US officials at the prison camps had alleged that they had seen prisoners being abused and tortured.

9) Imagine that we had turned some of the prisoners over to Josef Stalin for awhile to interrogate for us in Siberia, before he sent them back to our prison camps--and we reserved the right to send them back to Siberia.

10) Imagine, finally, that we decided we were not going to repeat the mistakes of World War I--that the Germans and particularly these soldiers could not be trusted not to unleash another round of horrors on Europe--and so it might be necessary to keep them in prison, not for four years, but for the indefinite future--quite possibly for the rest of their lives.

Hypothetically speaking, would that change how you felt about their lawyers at all?

There's a good post on Balkinization that addresses the general issue of clients leaning on lawyers.

The knave of hearts (the device of the concern troll) should have some tarts. Where are they!

And so to bed.

re: 34

Great stuff.

And all without using the phrase 'egregious fuckwit' as well!

Boycott the boycotters.

re: 38

Ah-hah, Mr Ranter. Like your blog, btw.

These detainees do NOT have the rights that a criminal defendant has in our country, and efforts to create those rights for these killers is beyond belief.

Says who?

I'd ask if he thinks that "pro bono" means "bill it all secret-like to a corporate client", but there's probably no point.

A couple of small things to add:

A. The government has said in several hearings that it appreciates that lawyers are doing this, and made representations in at least one case that it would like to see more.

B. When the Gitmo litigation started, there weren't many firms that would do it. Really, only after the Supreme Court said that prisoners had a right to bring HC suits did most firms get involved. (Only then did it make sense for additional firms to be involved: up to then, a single case was adequate to get the legal issues before the courts).

C. This ham handed initiative seems to have been designed to appeal to dead-enders, to give them something to talk about on the fifth anniversary. I frankly doubt that anyone in the government really thinks that Wall Street firms will see any significant backlash from this.

D. We all had a little laugh about firms that are involved that are not on the list. The lead guy from one such firm (a guy who's published several articles in major newspapers) sent around an email: 'Note to team -- More briefs.'

In all seriousness, Steve, get the fuck out of my country, you Red piece of shit.

42: SCMT is, as usual, quite right.

Although I feel kind of bad saying that on today of all days.

33: Yeah, imagine that, you quarterwit Steve.

42: But where would he go? The world is full of Hindoos and Deists and they all want to drink his blood.

34 and 40, meet 27.

re: 46

Thin and etiolated thought it may be?

46: Thin blood has its dietary advantages. Hella fewer clots in the ol' Crazy Straw(tm), for one thing.

6093:49: "46" s/b "48"

I think I have a blog crush on Tim now.