Wednesday, January 17, 2007

On Keith Olbermann's "Countdown," esteemed law professor Jonathan Turley had this to say about Charles Stimson's McCarthy-like comments:
It‘s outrageous. I mean, you know, this guy is some type of troglodyte. But what worries me is that the troglodytes feel comfortable coming out and saying things like this.

It‘s horrible. And the question is—should not be whether they‘re distancing themselves from his comments. He should be fired. I mean, I don‘t understand what it takes to be fired in this country—in this administration. But he‘s in charge of detainees in a place that has become the symbol of abuse, of American hypocrisy.

And he goes out on the air and clearly tries to get companies and CEOs to put pressure on lawyers not to represent these people, not to make sure the rule of law is followed. What does it take to get fired in the Bush administration?
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I think that lawyers around the country are going to respond, particularly the ABA, to this type of statement. I mean, this really violates a central covenant that we all have as lawyers. And it‘s something that we learned in law school, that having representation‘s essential to our system of government.

What Stimson is saying is that clients shouldn‘t have allowed John Adams to represent them, because he represented people in the Boston Massacre, who were just as unpopular as the people at Gitmo. So according to Stimson, John Adams should have been treated as a pariah.

It is un-American. And it takes more, I think, more of an obligation of the administration to simply say, He‘s not speaking for us. He is the leading official in charge of these detainees. What he said wasn‘t just (INAUDIBLE) wrong, it was positively vile for a lawyer to say such things.

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