A Stitch in Haste

The military, along with other government entities, is charged with defending the American way of life.

I was under the impression that a key component of the American way of life was the right to secure effective representation of counsel in criminal trials and other government attempts to deprive one of life, liberty or property.

Silly me:

The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation's top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms' corporate clients should consider ending their business ties.
...
Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs ... said, "I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.'s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.'s 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."

Private corporate clients, like private individuals, are certainly free to choose their attorneys based on whatever criteria, rational or irrational, that they wish — see one especially stupid example here.

But notice the same deliberate and dishonorable bait-and-switch that we have seen before: "representing terrorists." But of course, the correct expression, to those of us who are truly defending the American way of life, is "representing accused terrorists." Some Guantánamo detainees are undoubtedly guilty; some are undoubtedly not. Stimson, an evil man who shills for evil men, is trying to legitimize his evil views by blanking out the very fact that makes him and his co-conspirators evil: These detainees have been convicted of nothing, not even under the kangaroo tribunal system established by the Military Commission Act.

If you subscribe the Stimson's evil views, then the next step is self-apparent: a military policy, if not a Congressional statute, forbidding the military, defense contractors, or perhaps the entire federal government, from doing business with any of these law firms. It wouldn't be the first time that the government financially quashed freedom of conscience on behalf of the military.

I'll put my faith in the ethics codes of lawyers over the megalomaniacal War on Terror rationalizations of Pentagon apologists any day of the week.

And I suspect that, without a degradation from "moral suasion" to flat out threats, most "greedy" capitalists will make the right decisions too.

(POST SCRIPT: Just out of curiosity, I wonder what the client list of Halliburton's outside counsel looks like.)

More thoughts from Craiggie.net, MissLaura, Fables of the Reconstruction, The Impolitic, Carol Platt Liebau, Concurring Opinions, WaPo.

UPDATE #1: The Pentagon is now repudiating Stimson's remarks. Too little too late.

UPDATE #2: Stimson resigned.