Two big assholes of the right

1. Axes of Evil -- by William Fisher

Now here's a trio that makes Alberto Gonzales look like Clarence Darrow!

This trio consists of a senior Bush administration official, a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, and a conservative syndicated talk show host.

Their tawdry tale begins with right-wing talk show host Monica Crowley, a former Nixon apparatchik, who briefly appeared from California on an ill-fated MSNBC show with co-host Ron Reagan, son of the late president, from New York. It's a blessing they weren't in the same city, because their trans-Continental catfights sounded like "Firing Line" on steroids.

Well, seems Ms. Crowley filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the government for the names of all law firms representing detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. Why she had to spend her $50 to make this request is known only to her; the names have been available publicly and published innumerable times in various mainstream media and on a thousand Internet blogs.

But request she did, got the list, and was no doubt preparing to make a big media deal of it.

Except that someone stole her thunder. That someone turned out to be the senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism, Charles D. "Cully" Stimson, a deputy assistant secretary of defense.

Stimpson said, in a radio interview with a local Washington-based station aimed at government employees, that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation's top firms were representing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms' corporate clients should consider ending their business ties.

Then apparently warming to his task, he went on to say, "I think the news story that you're really going to start seeing in the next couple of weeks is this: As a result of a FOIA request through a major news organization, somebody asked, 'Who are the lawyers around this country representing detainees down there?' and you know what, it's shocking." That FOIA reference was, of course, to Monica Crowley's request.

Obviously a believer in a boffo close, Stimpson went on to say, "I think, quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out."

Mr. Stimson, who, as bizarre as it may seem, is himself a lawyer, named more than a dozen of the firms listed on the 14-page report provided to Ms. Crowley, describing them as "the major law firms in this country."

In my newsgathering work, it happens that I have spoken with a number of the lawyers from these major law firms representing Guantanamo detainees. There isn't space here to write of their commitment to the rule of law or recount all their tales of military obstruction and interference with their efforts to provide representation for their clients. But, trust me, almost any other pro bono case would be easier.

The New York Times reported that when asked in the radio interview who was paying for the legal representation, Stimson replied: "It's not clear, is it? Some will maintain that they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, that they're doing it pro bono, and I suspect they are; others are receiving moneys from who knows where, and I'd be curious to have them explain that."

According to the Times, "Lawyers expressed outrage at that, asserting that they are not being paid and that Mr. Stimson had tried to suggest they were by innuendo. Of the approximately 500 lawyers coordinated by the Center for Constitutional Rights, no one is being paid. One Washington law firm, Shearman & Sterling, which has represented Kuwaiti detainees, has received money from the families of the prisoners, but Thomas Wilner, a lawyer there, said they had donated all of it to charities related to the September 2001 terrorist attacks."

But this was a bandwagon that the third member of the trio apparently couldn't resist. He is Robert L. Pollock, a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, who mentioned the list of law firms in an article about life at Guantanamo. Pollack quoted an unnamed "senior US official" as saying, "Corporate CEOs seeing this should ask firms to choose between lucrative retainers and representing terrorists."

Predictably, Stimpson's comments produced an avalanche of anger from lawyers, legal ethics specialists, and bar association officials, who found his comments repellent and proof of an ignorance of the duties of lawyers to represent people in legal trouble.

The Pentagon, of course, disowned Stimpson's remarks and said they did not represent DOD policy. You may recall they did the same thing when General Jerry Boykin made disparaging remarks about Muslims while wearing his US Army uniform. And then did ... virtually nothing.

But here's the good news. None other than that valiant champion of the rule of law Attorney General Alberto Gonzales couldn't sit still for Stimpson's bile. Nor could he blow off the whole affair by claiming executive privilege or by refusing to disclose "operational details," as he has on so many earlier occasions.

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

Good job, Alberto!

Secretary Stimpson should be fired immediately, but as George Washington University law school professor Jonathan Turley rhetorically asked on Keith Olbermann's "Countdown," "What does it take to get someone fired" in the Bush administration?

Firing is probably not going to happen. As Plan B, however, the Bush administration should sentence Stimpson to listen to the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Roberts, you may recall, regaled the committee with many accounts of his pro bono work for Supreme Court petitioners whose views he didn't happen to share. Whatever shall we do with these activist jurists?

Or, as an alternative cruel and unusual punishment, maybe Secretary Stimpson should be ordered to watch repeated episodes of Law and Order, where he will hear many times, "You are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent," et cetera, followed by: "You have the right to an attorney. If you can't afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you."

That's the Miranda warning mandated by a United States Supreme Court decision. And it says nothing about having a second-rate lawyer, nor does it say this right is available only to select defendants.

But, of course, Secretary Stimpson knows all that. After all, he's an attorney - a former Navy lawyer and a graduate of George Mason University.

Maybe he just needs some refresher courses.

Right!

(William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and in many other parts of the world for the US State Department and USAID for the past thirty years. He began his work life as a journalist for newspapers and for the Associated Press in Florida. Go to The World According to Bill Fisher for more.)


2. Not Just Wrong, but All Wrong -- by Paul Campos/ Rocky Mountain News (Colorado)

Twenty years ago, in its pre-season baseball issue, Sports Illustrated predicted the Cleveland Indians would finish with the best record in the major leagues. Cleveland went on to finish with the worst record. Statistical guru Bill James pointed out that this represented an example of what might be called Maximum Possible Error.

When it comes to the Iraq war, some of our most prominent pundits have achieved similar results. Perhaps the most spectacular example is provided by William Kristol.

Since the start of the war, Kristol has claimed that "there's almost no evidence" Iraqi Shiites wouldn't be able to get along with Sunnis; that it was a mistake to worry that Iraq "would fracture into feuding clans and unleash a bloodbath"; that the January 2005 Iraqi elections represented "a genuine turning point," comparable to the fall of the Berlin Wall; that the situation in Iraq wouldn't get worse in 2006, and thus opposition to the war would prove to be an electoral disaster for Democrats; and that the Iraqi response to the bombing of the Samarra mosque this past February was "evidence of Iraq's underlying stability in the face of attempts to undermine it."

This is just a sample of the many things Kristol has said about Iraq that turned out to be not merely wrong, but the exact opposite of the truth. They represent nothing less than the Maximum Possible Error on all these matters.

And what has been the result of this astonishing performance? Have Kristol's employers fired him for gross incompetence? Has he been exiled from the national media for having been completely wrong, over and over again, about the most important issue facing America today?

Far from it! Kristol has just been hired by Time, America's leading news weekly, to write a column. This is the journalistic equivalent of handing the former captain of the Exxon Valdez a case of whiskey and the command of a fully loaded supertanker.

The nation's elite media continue to be in denial about the fact that most of America's most prominent pundits were wrong about Iraq. (Admittedly not all of them were as wrong as Kristol. The average pundit couldn't manage to be as wrong as Kristol if he tried.)

One symptom of this denial is the bizarrely upward trajectory of Kristol's career path. Another is how the fact that a number of commentators who were every bit as right about Iraq as Kristol has been wrong (modesty forbids me from noting I was among them) has gone down the memory hole.

These people pointed out that it was quite unclear whether Saddam Hussein still had any weapons of mass destruction; that, in any case, Iraq presented no military threat to the United States; that invading the country could well trigger factional bloodshed which would last many years; that fighting terrorism by trying to install democracy at gunpoint in Iraq made no sense; and that the whole project was likely to end in disaster.

At best, these dissenters were dismissed as "unserious" semi-pacifist hippies, who didn't understand how "9/11 changed everything." Often, their patriotism was slandered by supposedly respectable commentators like law professor Glenn Reynolds, who in the tradition of Joe McCarthy made ominous claims about how critics of the war were actively pro-terrorist, or at the very least were "acting unpatriotically" and "hurting our troops abroad."

And so it goes. For example, the terribly serious New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who just six weeks ago declared that the only rational alternatives in Iraq were a 150,000-troop escalation or a phased withdrawal, has now announced he'll support President Bush's 21,000-troop escalation - but only if Bush proposes a massive tax hike and does some other things that are as likely to happen as Saddam Hussein and John Belushi showing up to co-host next week's episode of Saturday Night Live.

If chutzpah was a crime, these guys would be serving life sentences.

(Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado.)