Lawyers Revolt Against Haynes And Yoo; Where’s The OPR Report?
As a card carrying member of the bar, I have to say it is about time that American lawyers learned something from their feisty compatriots in Pakistan. Sure enough, they have done exactly that. From the LA Times:
In an attempt to win sanctions against a former top Bush administration official over brutal interrogations of prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, a lawyers group deployed a strategy Monday that worked against Presidents Nixon and Clinton.
Former Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes II is the first of several former policymakers the National Lawyers Guild wants reprimanded, suspended or disbarred for their roles in detainee abuse, said Carlos Villarreal, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area guild chapter that filed a complaint against Haynes with the State Bar of California.
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A similar complaint is being prepared in Pennsylvania against former Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo, the UC Berkeley law professor who is currently a visiting professor at Chapman University School of Law in Orange, for his role in drafting the legal guidelines that approved enhanced interrogation techniques including waterboarding.
Would the National Lawyers Guild have only been so aggressive earlier, but, hey, better late than never. And it may have some effect as it is coming just before the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is on the verge of releasing what looks to be a scathing report on just this conduct from the Bush/Cheney Administration.
It has now been exactly a month since the Washington Post related the following:
Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (Ill.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) are demanding an update on the probe by the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which for more than a year has been examining whether the lawyers who prepared the memos followed professional standards.
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Two sources briefed on a draft of the report said there is a strong likelihood that its findings will be shared with state legal disciplinary authorities, who could launch their own investigation into whether the lawyers who prepared the memos abided by their professional responsibilities.
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Matthew Miller, a spokesman for new Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., said that "the matter is under review" but declined to comment further yesterday about whether Holder would endorse the investigators’ conclusions.
So, Attorney General Holder, let’s have the report and let’s have it now.
Digg is open Bmaz.
morning
I seconded the Digg, thanks JC..
I think lots of things are coming into play and that things are going to get even more interesting over the next couple of weeks..Yep, lots of popcorn and lots of sunlight
But, but what about all the lawyer jokes?
Lawyers as heros would certainly be a cultural shift for the average Joe.
Is it too soon to inquire into the conduct of OPR? This had better be one helluva thorough report, given that they’ve been working on it for over a year.
Let’s hope the US lawyers are as successful as their Pakistani colleagues.
Seems to me that they forgot to add Holder and Obama to that list. Holder has admitted under oath waterboarding is torture, yet still has not turned over evidence of torture or declassified such evidence and is engaged in obstruction. Holder has also continued to resist declassification or turnover of evidence of unconstitutional and illegal wiretapping of lawyers by the Executive branch. In Rasul, Obama is claiming the power to kidnap and torture and whim, as long as the Executive limits his purchases for human experimentation to non-US citizens (although the Lindh, Hamdi and Padilla cases don’t really stand for any principle of restraint when it comes to US citizens either).
The real lessons of the Nixon administration can’t ever be taught from the Bush, or now Obama, administrations. Bc it was a lesson of lawyers refusing the President. It’s not that President Nixon wasn’t “successful” in the end at getting Cox fired. It’s what happened to the American public when it realized that the President was asking the top lawyers in the country – Richardson and Ruckelshaus – to do something that they refused to do. That shaped the event in the national conscious and conscience.
The non-reaction by the lawyers in the administration when the torture memos became public did the same. They shaped the nation by their response, just as surely as Richardson shaped it by his. That lesson won’t be untaught now – it has become a part of who we are and its why all the rolling revelations have so little impact. With Abu Ghraib and the torture memos coming out, if there had been massive public protests from DOJ at continuing to work for torturers, or from the legal institutions at keeping torturers licensed, the nation would be different today.
If there had been ANY public protest at DOJ, the nation would be different today. But it’s as if Richardson fired Cox and the whole Watergate thing was just ignored. People rightly make lawyer jokes all the time, but the truth is that when lawyers openly draw the line, it makes an impact. If the follow up to Abu Ghraib and the beginnings of the torture memo leaks had been revolt at DOJ, we could have ended up with a decent human being at the helm, but there wasn’t any revolt. There wasn’t even a smidge of public discontent. It’s all very well and good to point to Haynes and Yoo, but when will the thousands and thousands who gave their support by showing up every day, knowingly and contentedly going to work for torturers, without quibble or open protest, ever have any consequence?
Never.
But they made this a torture nation just as surely as did John Yoo.
Mary: “thousands and thousands”
Can we assume then that DOJ internal culture has been resculpted over time to make protest unworkable? And the rest of us chickens have trouble getting worked up in any organised fashion due to…THE MEDIA! Over a longish period of brainwash time of course.
^^Yes that is fairly obvious but I thought I’d mention it anyway. One might focus on that mass mind-control phenomenon instead of, or in addition to specific crimes and perps. Need it be said that as long as the people go along, the Cheneys and the Mukaseys are free to wield their power. It has been essentially proven that none of them expects to see jail, or even indictment; to me that means they won.
Keep rallying the troops and don’t despair.
Do you remember how long it was after Mitchell left DoJ before he was indicted?
It’s nice that the NLG is taking a bit of a stand, but where’s the ABA?
Danner…..
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22530
but, but, but holder is too busy looking forward…
bmaz,
I thought this was the universal graphic for lawyers.
Mary wrote:
Cogent and clear. Thank you.
Just curious about this. And it may be OT. But have there been huge differences between presidents who have legal training and those who didn’t? I realize the post is specific to top bushandcheneyco lawyers. But how about the impact of “leaders” who undermine the law and never really had an allegiance to the law on top of that? And does that affect the kind of “lawyer” they hire and the reasons they hire them, in addition to the kind of “lawyer” who would work toward ends, which the law-avoiding “leaders” expect from them?
10 – I think that might be an element. I know that LHP has made some good arguments that it was too daunting a set up for whistleblowers to come forward and out, but that isn’t what bothers me as much. I agree that it is hard hard hard to ever be the whistleblower (Tamm deserves so much more than an Obama administration).
But it’s one thing to not be a whistleblower and quite another thing, once the whistle has been blown, to just shrug and show up to work for torturers the next day, and the next, and the next. For someone halfway competent and halfway decent, it is not asking much from them to ask that when they government is openly advocating for torture without trial, that they submit a petition, or a resignation, with a protest. But it never happened. It happened everywhere else but DOJ, in smaller and larger groups – whether it was military JAG complaining or resigning, or a FISCt judge resigning, or a diplomat resiging with letters to the editor.
But the DOJ had no public outcry of any kind against torture. It has remained a solidly pro-torture bastion, where despite alleged taunts between lawyers, not one emerged to publically advocate for and demand leadership change to a leader who would prosecute torture or to even submit a resignation premised on an inability to work for torturers.
I agree that being a whistleblower is more than should be demanded of anyone, but having the common decency and minimal professional standards to stand up and refuse to be complicit in torture, once it is exposed, was not too much to expect. When it wasn’t there, when the top lawyers in the country, entrusted with the legal system of the nation, shrugged over torture and began finding ways to use and exclude torture to the benefit of the government in prosecutions, we really changed as a nation on a foundational level.
Mary: “…began finding ways to use and exclude torture to the benefit of the government in prosecutions…”
Perhaps it should be kept in mind that torture has been shown NOT to be an effective means of retrieving good info. So its use “benefits govt” only by inducing fear, while it may benefit the individual torturer as does an orgasm.
My point was and is that if torture has become an institutionalized part of DOJ or any other govt agency, the agency can be declared illegitimate; that is it has ceased to perform a govt function and is now a rogue, under the control of torturers whose function is not even similar to the official job description. Still on the payroll though – hah.
Since we know that responsibility for this saturation of crime goes right to the top, it follows that the entire govt, everything under the president, is illegitimate, as laid out in the previous paragraph. If you choose to call it a case of a few bad apples, like Yoo, then you must explain why Yoo is still a licensed lawyer, free, etc. Same goes for Rumsfeld and all the rest of them. IOW it is a much bigger problem than who is guilty of what.
I have been saying from the very start, the ONLY way we can get these “opinions” of yoo turned into toilet paper is by disbarring the man
there is always precedence and when there are no sanctions against legal decisions then that decision carries the weight of precedence
yoo must be disbarred
15 – thanks for the pep talk. I guess it’s age-I just always felt like there was some, amorphous “those guys” who were going to make things come out ok back then. I’m not a kid anymore, though, and I just don’t have that feeling anymore.
If you see this, here’s a Bloomberg piece making the same point you did about SWAT in a different thread on the Pakistani judge situation
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/…..efer=india
And here were a couple pieces that I found interesting
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03…..rouse.html
http://www.recordonline.com/ap…..44/-1/NEWS
When I see and read about the closing of so many schools I think of someone like Greg Mortenson and what must be going through his mind – I know he’s not a politician and doesn’t want to make his efforts political, but he’s had to work with Taliban and Sharia and I think his take would be interesting, but I have to believe he’d be very frustrated.
Funny, back then I felt as you do now. I was sure that the whole country was flying apart and falling into the muck.
I remember sitting on nails waiting for the Court to decide Nixon, speculating about how a split would let that Dick ignore the ruling.
Burger and 9-0? Compliance and resignation? How likely did that seem?
Thanks for all the stuff on SWAT. That place is entirely fusterclucked and it’s going to take many guys like Mortenson to renew the commitment to decency that’s necessary.
What do you mean you’re not a kid? You still sound like you can bite the ass off anything in the barnyard.
“Rule of law? Sorry, it’ll have to wait till after the financial crisis is over…”
Mark those words down. If they pull that kind of crap with Yoo and Haynes, you can bet the fix is in big time and the economy is in the same competent hands that have been at the tiller througout the Bush administration…