Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Lawyers let down U.S. justice system


By PAT MURPHY

The American legal profession could take a lesson from its Pakistani counterparts, then hang its collective head in shame.

Thousands of Pakistani lawyers dressed in black ties and suits paraded en masse in the streets of the capital, Islamabad, angrily protesting Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s suspension of Pakistan’s Constitution and the ouster of most members of the Pakistani Supreme Court.

Hundreds were arrested and jailed while trying vainly to salvage their nation’s withering liberties from further political tyranny.

However, how does our legal profession react when constitutional liberties are being torn asunder by lawyers in high presidential places?

Except for a few gallant attorneys with the courage to denounce lawlessness by President Bush and his lawyers in the White House’s politicized legal apparatus, the U.S. legal profession has shown precious little fury about the shredding of Americans’ rights on the advice of—guess who—top lawyers in the Bush presidency.

Is it because men and women who’re on the front lines of our court system are too busy chasing big clients? Or are they cowed by the ruthlessness of the Bush White House?

The legal profession barely shrugged when U.S. attorneys were fired for being insufficiently political in their work.

When torture was authorized and wiretapping of Americans was green-lighted by the Justice Department, protests came from the usual small cadre of civil rights attorneys who’re automatically blown off by rightwing politicians as liberal, un-American gadflies.

And what did the organized bar do when President Bush authorized the CIA to kidnap people off the street and spirit them away in chartered U.S. jets to foreign prisons for ruthless physical interrogations without due process like some Third World dictator? Zero.

Lawyers should’ve been livid and storming the congressional ramparts.

The legal profession can redeem itself, if it cares. State bar disciplinary committees with jurisdiction over attorneys can take up the conduct of key Bush lawyers and sanction them for violating rules of professional conduct.

If Arkansas can suspend Bill Clinton’s license to practice for five years, does the State Bar of Texas, with jurisdiction over disgraced Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ license to practice, have the will to sanction one of U.S. history’s most incorrigibly deceitful, intellectually corrupt attorneys general?

Until the legal profession denounces abuses of law by presidential attorneys and purges its profession of outlaws who violate oaths to protect the U.S. Constitution, the American rule of law, so often cited as the glue that keeps U.S. democracy intact, will continue to shrivel in the hands of those whose ambitions aren’t much different than Pakistan’s megalomaniac Gen. Musharraf.




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