Saturday, February 20, 2010

Where are the Lawyers?



In Pakistan, when the government goes off the legal/lawful rails and into the ditch of arbitrary authority, the lawyers rise up, take to the streets, and demand redress, resignations, and restitution.

Not here. No way. A lawyer doing more than filing a suit or a brief? Unheard of! The very idea. Pshaw.

On Friday, the Justice (so-called) Department released the long-delayed OPR report on the malfeasance of John Yoo and James Bybee in preparing the notorious Torture Memos for use by the Bush Administration in coercing information and confessions from captives held in various places throughout our Nation's growing constellation of concentration camps and gulags for Taliban and Al Qaeda and miscellaneous resistance suspects.

The American legal profession demonstrated a signal lack of courage and leadership all through the depredations of the Bush years, and it continues to essentially stand aside as the Obama administration expands on the lawlessness of the Busheviks. The failure of the legal profession to raise its collective voice against the lawlessness that has been the widening American practice at home and abroad will be remembered as not just a failure of courage, but perhaps as the leading factor in the transformation of the American state from a faulty and balky self-governing Constitutional Republic into a thoroughgoing Imperial autocracy.

Some individual lawyers have certainly been both rebellious and courageous in opposition to the Bush regime and its factotums intent on establishing and institutionalizing an Imperial state based on domestic and international surveillance, lawless and arbitrary detention of those deemed to be Enemies of the State, and the projection of force -- through terror, random carnage, and torture -- throughout the world. Individual attorneys continue to stand up, some at considerable risk to themselves, but as a collective, the bar and bench, the legal profession as a whole, has been all but silent, when not actively complicit.

And it has been devastating for the Rule of Law and respect for the Rule of Law in this country and around the world.

This silence and complicity is a lasting stain on the American legal profession. And yet, even now, they evince no shame.

We are well and truly fucked.

The OPR Report

Over at Sully's Place at the Atlantic, the following is quoted from page 144 of the Report:

"I just hope that when all of this comes out, the institution doesn't take the hit, but rather the hit is taken by those individuals who occupied positions at OLC and OAG and were too weak to stand up for the principles that undergird the rest of this great institution," - Deputy AG Jim Comey, in an email to Chuck Rosenberg, p. 144 in the OPR Report.


Yes, well, Mister Comey, the institution has taken the hit, continues to take the hit, and will be subject to the contempt it has so richly earned so long as fundamental reform, from the ground up, is avoided. Not only has the institution of the Department of Justice been potentially irreparably harmed by the refusal of its leaders and staff to resist the imposition of this lawless regime, the entire legal profession has been soiled.

A fine mess.

And as if that weren't enough, the "Justice" Department also announces the official closing of the Anthrax Investigation, with the suicided Bruce Ivins as the only suspect.

Ain't we got fun.

Please enjoy Marcy Wheeler's deconstructions:

The OPR: http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/02/19/opr-report-working-thread/

The Anthrax: http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/02/19/doj-anthrax-report-working-thread/

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