Can any administration shills defend this and defend why this guy wasn’t immediately called on the carpet? In fact, why wasn’t he told that his services are no longer needed?
DOD issued a statement “disavowing” his remarks. Well hooray for them.
Stimson identified by name a whole bunch of law firms in the course of the interview. It’s hard to see this as other than a blatant attempt to intimidate attorneys in order to deny detainees representation.
I heard about this on Countdown with Keith Olbermann. The web site probably won’t be updated until after the late re-broadcast of the show, but it’s on here in the Mountain Zone at 10 p.m. The talking heads were all working hard to find the right words to express their disgust with this Stimson fellow. They did a better job that I would have. I’m afraid my response would have been something like “Jesus H. Christ! Are you fucking kidding me!?” And that would have been if I’d had time to prepare.
Whattaya’ wanna’ bet Stimson gets re-assigned in the not too distant future?
Fascinating. The implication of both of those articles is that the administration is firing the US Attorneys who went after public corruption. Which, perhaps incidentally, became a major election issue recently. Wonder if there’s a connection?
David, I too read the article with some bemusement. Whoever this Stimson guy is, he’s got no clue who he’s dealing with. BigLaw is going to wear this as a badge of honor. And truly, all the Fortune 500 go to the AmLaw 100 for most or all their work, but they shift it around periodically. So, cynically, I can see this as an opportunity for some GC’s to try to negotiate better rates.
“We’re concerned about your firm’s stand on terrorism. We understand you represent some of those nasty people at Gitmo. Unless we get a 5% discount on your fees, we’ll be taking our business across the street.”
What I find most intriguing is that the media appears to have bought into Stimson’s theory that BigLaw will lose clients when this “comes out.” Why else would they have been so careful not to name a single firm?
And, incidentally, his comment that he suspects that some of the firms are getting money from somewhere (implication – from terrorists) displays a shocking lack of knowledge about the administration’s rules about “doing business with terrorists” and the reporting requirements law firms and other businesses already are under should they do business with someone who is on the suspected terrorist list. He’s either ignorant or dishonest. Hard to tell at this point which one.
i don’t know why a lawyer of renown hasn’t appeared in defense. Give it a little time and if no one defends close it. No point in putting it in the Pit since there is already a thread there.
As lawyers, we have an ethical responsibility to represent unpopular defendants. It staggers me that any official at any level, especially one who used to be a practicing lawyer himself, would ignore that.
This president seems to attract lawyers who must have skipped all that sort of stuff in their education. Such as Yoo, Gonzales. et al.
I expect few defenders here, if any, but I suspect you would find several if you stopped people on the street and asked. There is a thread on the SDMB that asked how easy it would be to get an authoritative government in the US. It appears to me that if you frighten people enough it wouldn’t be all that hard. I hear defenses of our handling of detainees, a little torture now and then, secret prisons and stuff like that all the time at the golf course.
Given that most of not all of the people detained at Gitmo have no contact with the outside world, including access to bank accounts or sponsors, isn’t it pretty much a given that any representation they receive is pro bono?
The whole Guantánamo Bay detention activity is scarcely less horrifying than anything revealed by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the crimes of the Soviet Gulag system. That the current Congress doesn’t make it an immediate priority to eliminate this system and process the detainees per international agreements for the internment of prisoners of war speaks to the compromise of principles of both major parties. We can expect this sort of thing from the current Presidential Administration as a matter of course, which is every bit as disingeneous as the worst of the Johnson and Nixon presidencies, but that no one is willing to seriously stand up and oppose it feeds my deep-rooted cynicism about politicians of any stripe.
As king of the Indefensible Position, I suppose the duty must fall to me:
Ummm… this is going to be tough, but here goes:
Who are you to attack this man’s right to free expression? Should he be penalized for holding and vocalizing his opinion? It’s been clearly stated that this is his personal opinion and not an official one, so what’s the problem?
Are you going to go out and take the jobs away from other people who have opinions you don’t like and dare to censor the right to free speech? Do you really want to go down that slippery slope?
You may abhor what he says but you should defend his right to say it. Shame on you all.
Hey! That was pretty good. I surprised myself there! I just hope nobody points out that the asshole was speaking in his official capacity and using his position innapropriately to promote a personal agenda that directly contradicts his professional responsibility to protect the very freedoms of expression without threat of retribution that I alluded to.
My point simply was this: he’s either ignorant of the rules regarding “doing business with” suspected terrorists, or he’s deliberately ignoring them to suggest that law firms could somehow avoid those requirements (they cannot) to reap the big bucks from these terrorists. I do think that, in that context, it’s an either/or. He may be, generally speaking, both ignorant and dishonest. But we can’t tell just from this.
Not necessarily. Remember that none of this is based on personal knowledge, just general knowledge of how pro bono representation works (and in the civil arena, at that).
When taking on a pro bono representation, we will generally tell the client that our services are free, but that if the opportunity to recover our fees from the other side arises, we will pursue that opportunity. For example, if we represent a client in a bad real estate transaction, and the contract at issue permits the prevailing party to get its attorneys fees, we will inform the client that we will move to get those fees awarded by the court. (Whether the firm keeps the fees or donates them to a Legal Aid-type organization is another matter.)
But in this particular situation, I gather that one of the things the attorneys are trying to do is demonstrate that the prisoners should not be at Gitmo because they aren’t enemy combatants. To do that, it’s likely that the attorneys are gathering facts, likely by contacting family and friends of the prisoner. It’s also likely that said family and friends are offering to subsidize the legal work. Nothing wrong with that; as I said, law firms that do pro bono work generally are willing to be paid for such work (but are willing to do it without pay no matter what).
And I think that’s this guy’s beef – these big city lawyers are taking on these criminal cases, and are crawling through the underworld to help these guys out, and along the way, associates of these terribly dangerous criminals are offering them money. How do we really know what these lawyers are being paid to do?
As I said, Stimson must have skipped his ethics class. And he probably learned nothing from the Illinois Bar’s refusal to give Matthew Hale a law license. When I was in law school, they told us, “Someday someone will come into your office. He will need your help. You won’t be able to take his case: you’re too busy, you need the fees, whatever it is. But he’s defenseless and oppressed. You cannot turn him away.”
They will name libraries after this guy. His foresight and astute mind are remarkable. There is no doubt the policy he advocates is the natural and inevitable development of current American jurisprudence.
It has taken significant bravery and conviction from the administration’s lawyers to put their shoulder to the wheel of the legal theory evoked by the President and congress over the past 6 years. There is a largeness of mind needed to give a voice to the silenced majority of America, who long for their nation to revoke all law since before the Magna Carta.
For decades the United States has been plagued by whiny liberals from the coast, with their bleating about ‘constitutionality’ & ‘separate powers’. It’s time for red blooded America to show the majority’s colors, and Stimson, he’s their man.
One has to suspect (if one didn’t already) that the Admin has nuthin’ on the guys in Gitmo and is running dead scared that given a bit of competent representation all or most of them are going to walk free.
One wonders if Stinson had been around in the Revolutionary days, if he would have called for boycotting John Adams for defending the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre. The guy’s an idiot. The Gitmo lawyers are no more treasonous than Adams was.
