Or Maybe ….

by

by von

Cliff May:

Until a few days ago, Charles "Cully" Stimson, a former JAG officer and prosecutor, served as assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs. I met him recently when I visited the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the most dangerous of America’s enemy combatants are held.

Many of those who criticize Guantanamo allege that detainees at the facility do not have legal representation. They are either misinformed or lying: Not only does the International Committee of the Red Cross have regular access to detainees, there also are scores of American attorneys representing detainees on a pro bono basis.

Why do they do that? Maybe it is because they are genuinely concerned about protecting due process for detainees. Or maybe it is because they are, as Stimson said “receiving moneys from who-knows-where.” (Or – and this is my conjecture – perhaps they are currying favor with governments and groups that are or can become rewarding clients.)

Or maybe Cliff May doesn’t do "research" because it’s boring.  Or maybe Cliff May was too busy beating his wife.  Or maybe Cliff May was selling state secrets to the Russians at the time.  Or maybe Cliff May is a plaigarist, and is only repeating what he read elsewhere.  Or maybe — and this is my conjecture — Cliff May is a lazy thinker who deserves to be fired for writing such irresponsible garbage.

These are the questions that demand a response.

Over to you, Cliff.

57 thoughts on “Or Maybe ….”

  1. Or maybe — and this is my conjecture — Cliff May is a lazy thinker who deserves to be fired for writing such irresponsible garbage.
    that’s not conjecture, that’s induction.
    or maybe… it’s no moon, it’s a Space Station.
    i forget

  4. This reminds me of Caddyshack for some reason:
    Lacey Underall: My uncle says you’ve got a screw loose.
    Ty Webb: Your uncle molests collies.

  6. Lacey Underall: My uncle says you’ve got a screw loose.
    Ty Webb: Your uncle molests collies.
    As Juan Non-Anon Volokh will tell you, such ad hominem arguments are strictly forbidden in polite company. The uncle’s collie-molesting in no way disqualifies him from pronouncing on the mental stability of others.

  7. “Or maybe — and this is my conjecture — Cliff May is a lazy thinker who deserves to be fired for writing such irresponsible garbage.”
    From National Review, for classic baiting like that?
    That’ll be the day.
    After all, they have such a long and consistent record of policing themselves that way. If anyone there ever defended Jim Crow, or opposed civil rights legislation, or red-baited, they were out, out, out!
    It’s perfectly reasonable to expect them to stick to their long established practices in this. Absolutely.

  11. May’s argument here is, basically, a bastardized version of the Church Lady gambit.
    “Could it be….. Satan?”
    I say he should be required to wear a frumpy dress and support hose whenever he trots it out. Church Lady dance is optional.
    Thanks –

  15. Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the most dangerous of America’s enemy combatants are held.

    I wasn’t aware that Osama and his inner circle had been captured. Well done!

  16. NR and NRO…
    I know what you’re saying, and don’t take me for a big supporter (or heaven forbid a subscriber). Still, I read these comments here, wandered over to NRO, and almost smack at the top of the page…
    Jonathan Adler:
    For a government attorney to suggest that law firms should suffer consequences for representing detainees is contrary to the spirit, if not the letter, of the codes of professional responsibility to which attorneys commit themselves. The bar, as a whole, has a well-established obligation to try and ensure that all people have access to representation. This means that all individuals, even suspected terrorists, are entitled to retain a capable legal defense when subjected to judicial process, and it is wrong to impugn attorneys on the basis of the clients they represent.
    Then he goes on to say that whether they deserve that level of process is a separate question and bemoans that it is a tactic used against the right so we should know better, blah, blah.
    But still – he did stick up for the lawyers at least, right there on the main page. That doesn’t repudiate anything said here. I just thought I’d mention it, because I went there fully primed to see something ridiculous, or silence on the matter. Instead the first thing I see is that.

  17. “Instead the first thing I see is that.”
    If anyone has suggested here that it’s mandatory that everything posted on NRO be wrong, or silly, or offensive, or badly reasoned, or in some way flawed, I missed that.
    Neither do I hold the current writers of NR or NRO responsible for that which was written in NR in the Sixties or Fifties. I merely hold them responsible for associating themselves with that material, and the proud tradition of NR, and draping that mantle over themselves by choosing to write for the magazine with that heritage. (Though stuff like Jonah Goldberg’s defense of Charles Lindbergh is certainly stirring.)
    Similarly, I don’t hold members of ANSWER responsible for the crimes of North Korea; I merely hold them responsible for being members of an organization that defends and applauds those crimes.
    And folks who write for The Nation are choosing to associate themselves with the heritage of that magazine, of course.

  19. anderson – what happened to your blog?
    Ach. It became inconsistent with certain extra-internet priorities, let’s just put it that way. (“Anderson” is likely to experience a similar fate.) Thanks for asking!

  20. If anyone has suggested here that it’s mandatory that everything posted on NRO be wrong, or silly, or offensive, or badly reasoned, or in some way flawed, I missed that.
    Me too.
    The setup was there, the main post, your comments, lj’s – I get over there expecting to see more nonsense and instead it looks like Katherine was guest posting. (Apologies Katherine if reading that caused any kind of reflexive violent movement that resulted in injury.)
    Just thought it worth mentioning. Or not.

  21. Clifford May is an appalingly stupid man. Here he is 4/8/04:

    President Roosevelt waited until after World War II to put in place a commission to investigate what mistakes led to Pearl Harbor. That was a wise move, but then Roosevelt did not face the kind of hyper-partisanship that plagues America these days.

    Is he so thoroughly unaware of history that he doesn’t know that FDR died before VE Day? Did he not even bother to look and find out that the commission investigating Pearl Harbor release released its report on January 23, 1942?

  22. Point to OCSteve! You are right, and one dingbat on the team doesn’t deserve the whole team getting kicked off the tournament. However, I think most of them have some serious problems that make them less than worthy of von’s attentions. imho, of course.
    I’d also note that beyond issues of rhetoric, the physical resemblance between May and Church Lady is … striking.

  23. Steve, Adler was inevitably immediately replied to; Here is Andy McCarthy:

    I must register dissent from Jon Adler’s arguments. With due respect, they are typical of the elitist claims by members of the bar that the obligations of the profession trump the sensibilities, and, indeed, the duties, of citizenship.
    Jon must refer to the “spirit” of the codes of professional responsibility because, thus far, not even the legal profession, despite the unreservedly Leftist bent of its highly active activists, has had the nerve to suggest that fealty to a body of rules for lawyers is more important than the fealty we lawyers, as American citizens, owe to the United States — including the obligation not to lend aid and comfort to the enemy.
    And on that score, Jon, we are not talking about people “subjected to the judicial process.” If these were ordinary criminal defendants — the “accused” for whom our laws require counsel such that we must even pay for them to have it — you would have a point. Lawyers for those defendants are fulfilling a constitutional function that our system says lawyers must fill. Here, however, we are dealing with alien enemy combatants who are in the military system, not the judicial process. They have no right to counsel. They are not U.S. indigents at sea in our civilian civil and criminal courts. They are enemy combatants detained by the military because they are making war on the United States and subjected to military commissions because they have violated the laws of civilized warfare. The lawyers who flock to them are not fulfilling a constitutional mission. They are volunteers — against the public interest.

    And so on and so on.
    Cliff May also responded:

    Jonathan, your points are well taken but surely it should be of interest if some of the most prestigious attorneys representing detainees at Guantanamo say they are working pro bono but are in fact being secretly paid by foreign interests who prefer to remain anonymous. (And don’t expect the MSM to pull reporters off investigations into U.S. intelligence efforts to find out.)
    Also: Cully apologized for him remarks. Why isn’t that adequate? Again, is there any doubt that he’d still have his job had he complained about the quantity or quality of lawyers representing Guantanamo detainees?

    The show goes ever on.
    This is, I point out, from the absolutely consistent playbook I’ve been pointing out that the red-baiting McCarthyite/Nixonite/National Review brand of Republican crowd have been engaging in for most, if not all, of the 20th century. If you were for the civil liberties of Americans, you were a commie and a likely paid agent of the Soviet Union, or associated with one; now you’re a terrorist sympathizer, and probably paid by Saudi Arabia, or Iran.
    And the ACLU is always a demonpit of communist terrorsymps.

  24. OCSteve: no, the NRO is not uniformly dreadful. On the other hand, as Randy Paul’s example illustrates, they’re the sort of publication where you really do have to google every darn assertion just to see if it’s true.
    Just for giggles, I link to a post I did on ‘Blog Like A Conservative” day, which I think was before your time. I thought it was unfair to suppose that there was a way that all conservatives blogged, but the fun was too much to pass up, so I decided to blog like one particular conservative, namely the NRO’s completely idiotic economics commenter, who comes pretty close to being a moron all the time. (Ignore all the links at the end; that’s just a joke on InstaPundit.)
    Enjoy.

  25. Is he so thoroughly unaware of history that he doesn’t know that FDR died before VE Day? Did he not even bother to look and find out that the commission investigating Pearl Harbor release released its report on January 23, 1942?
    Not to mention that he is so ignorant that he can claim FDR did not face “hyper-partisanship.”

  26. Andy McCarthy’s writing sucks. He specializing in obscuring meaningful legal distinctions in order to appeal to the basist instincts of the least informed. It’s a skill, but an ugly and unflattering one.
    On a more important note, I actually do understand that a lot of the reported “interference” by the DOJ is in fact attributable to enforcement of rules that civilian lawyers are violating.
    But that has nothing to do with what Cully Stimson said. The ethical and professional obligation of an attorney not to impair the representation of unpopular clients has nothing to do with whether the bunk beds in Guantanamo are comfy.

  27. Let’s try my first paragraph again:
    Andy McCarthy’s writing sucks. He specializES in obscuring meaningful legal distinctions in order to appeal to the basEst instincts AMONG the least informed. It’s a skill, but an ugly and unflattering one.

  29. Actually, May may have been somewhat in the vicinity of the right track on the Pearl Harbor investigation thing: there WAS a committee investigation in 1946 – document here ; instigated, IIRC, by the newly-majority Republicans in order to pin some kind of “responsibility” or “pre-knowledge” of Pearl Harbor on FDR. It failed in that, but also IIRC, it backfired in that what the committee did find was a series of intelligence glitches and procedural cockups by the Army, Navy and FBI (a trifecta!) – but nothing on Roosevelt. Typical.

  30. “…they are working pro bono but are in fact being secretly paid by foreign interests who prefer to remain anonymous.”
    It was just so much easier in the days of the Comintern. I can’t even guess what foreign interests Cliff May is trying to smear people with by association.
    This is a very complicated war.

  31. On a more important note, I actually do understand that a lot of the reported “interference” by the DOJ is in fact attributable to enforcement of rules that civilian lawyers are violating.
    Care to elaborate?

  32. “Reminds me that the root of the word ‘awful’ is to be filled with awe.”
    That’s the older usage of the word, of course: “this cathredral is awful” means “this cathedral fills me with awe.”

    aw·ful (ô’fəl) pronunciation
    adj.
    1. Extremely bad or unpleasant; terrible: had an awful day at the office.
    2. Commanding awe: “this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath” (Herman Melville).
    3. Filled with awe, especially:
    1. Filled with or displaying great reverence.
    2. Obsolete. Afraid.
    4. Formidable in nature or extent: an awful burden; an awful risk.
    adv. Informal.
    Extremely; very: was awful sick.
    See 2, 3, and 4.
    [Middle English aweful, awe-inspiring, blend of awe, awe. See awe, and *ayfull, awful (from Old English egefull : ege, dread + -full, -ful).]

  34. Errr, that was the point. Etymological aside, the process of ‘awe-filled’ going to ‘awful’ is the process by which semantic items that indicate one extreme invert polarity. cf. ‘bad’, ‘sick’.
    I think nowadays, this is driven by sarcasm, so a phrase like ‘Oh, that’s just great’ would gain a negative polarity. Or the old joke about the linguist who announces, after a wide ranging investigation of the world’s languages that a repeated affirmation can never mean negation, to which someone in the back of the room says ‘yeah, yeah’…
    And a literary aside, one should note that uses of awful in Melville are often designed to invoke that bipolar reading, which is a trope in that novel, as in where he uses whiteness to heighten the evil and terror of the whale
    This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are?
    So it is with McCarthy, in that I am awed by the awfullness of his prose. When confronted with it, what can anyone do but stand agog and wonder what kind of thought process can produce it on such a regular and consistent basis?

  35. I can picture Mr. McCarthy as a prosecutor wondering why we bother with trials, since we already know everyone is guilty.
    I don’t picture him wondering why if we had all those German POWs in various prison camps in the United States we are keeping these particular prisoners — people he thinks we can hold under the law of war — in a special off-shore law-free location. He surely knows the answer to that . . .

  37. May is just following in the footsteps of Denny Hastert:

    The spat began in an interview on Fox News with anchor Chris Wallace, in which Hastert said, “You know, I don’t know where George Soros gets his money. I don’t know where — if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from. …”
    Asked if Soros had earned money from drug cartels, Hastert added, “Well, that’s what he’s been for a number years — George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he’s got a lot of ancillary interests out there. … I’m saying I don’t know where groups — could be people who support this type of thing. I’m saying we don’t know.”

    And even setting aside the lack of evidence, I can’t quite figure out why drug cartels would be in favor of legalizing drugs, when it would cause their prices to plummet.
    Tony Blankley has similarly called Soros “a Jew who figured out a way to survive the Holocaust”.

  39. I find it charming, though, that these “journalists” seem to think that Gitmo lawyers, who’ve been thoroughly investigated in connection with their security clearances, ought to be investigated by the New York Times. What, the FBI isn’t up to the task?

  41. Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the most dangerous of America’s enemy combatants are held.


    I wasn’t aware that Osama and his inner circle had been captured. Well done!
    One would be Khalid Sheikh Muhammed.
    I don’t picture him wondering why if we had all those German POWs in various prison camps in the United States we are keeping these particular prisoners — people he thinks we can hold under the law of war — in a special off-shore law-free location. He surely knows the answer to that . . .
    Say for instance, KSM goes from unlawful combatant status to criminal status. Lynne Stewart, before being disbarred, could assist KSM with communicating with other AQ members. Nowadays I cannot trust that some lawyer will not do this very thing. Not every lawyer, not most lawyers, but there is always a Ramsey Clark type around. It’s too bad that Stewart and Clark have ruined it for everybody, but that is the way it is.
    I don’t want the bad guys in the country.

  43. “What, the FBI isn’t up to the task?”
    Remember, these guys have to simultaneously believe that:
    a) government is inherently incompetent, is less efficient than private enterprise, and can’t be trusted, particularly because government is always trying to increase its power over the people;
    and:
    b) we should trust government completely as regards security, secrecy, military affairs of all manner, running wars, running foreign countries, and anything it says is justified in the name of any of the above.
    It’s no wonder if anyone trying to believe both these things simultaneously gets a little confused now and again.

  45. DaveC, if KSM is brought to trial — and he certainly should be — he’ll have appointed counsel. A military officer. If he also has a private lawyer (as some commission defendants do), it’ll be someone who’s been investigated pretty seriously, and who has Ms. Stewart’s example.
    You should spend more time worrying about crazed right-wingers shooting up shopping malls. Not very likely, but more likely than anyone being harmed by a smuggled message from KSM. (Who, by the way, hasn’t got a following. SFAIK, he was The Engineer, not a charismatic ideologue.)

  46. thanks, DaveC. totalitarianism is always more efficient.
    What I am saying is that these guys like KSM, when they commit acts of war against the US do not have to be treated the same way as a US citizen.

  47. What I am saying is that these guys like KSM, when they commit acts of war against the US do not have to be treated the same way as a US citizen
    and how, exactly, are you supposed to know whether you’ve got KSM or a cook? Torture?
    [brief aside] I got lost in the woods once in the course of a drunken fraternity event. Being really cold sucks, even if crocked. It sucks worse as one sobers up.
    [end aside]
    The US military is using rectal probes to monitor core body temperature during cold torture. oh my effing Odin. I would confess to nailing Christ on the cross in order to be warm.
    Testimony obtained under harsh interrogation is useless. Defense counsel is critical (CRITICAL!) to ensuring that the govt proves its case. Otherwise, we will imprison the innocent, and, in our zeal, simply forget to find and prosecute the guilty.

  48. See, not that long ago I posed the question about a local murderer, let’s call him the Burger King killer, who had years earlier confessed to killing two young girls, and there was physical eveidence, etc., but he went free because of police procedure which didn’t involve torture by any stretch of the imagination.
    I also speculated that the Brown’s Chicken murderers will go free be cause physical evidence was lost. (They confessed after being presented with the evidence, now that evidence is lost).
    And the response was “It’s the police department’s fault”.
    I just don’t think that we can do that with bigtime terrorists like KSM. We can’t raise set the threshold to beyond a reasonable doubt and without any procedural mess-ups.

  49. Anyone interested in going to the source documents on DaveC’s discussion, they are here
    I’d just observe that it was an open thread, which has a higher level of frivolity, which might be why DaveC felt the discussion tended towards being less than serious.

  50. Ummm…:
    BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — A man sentenced to death in Kuwait for the 1983 bombings of the U.S. and French embassies now sits in Iraq’s parliament as a member of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s ruling coalition, according to U.S. military intelligence.
    Really, I just don’t know what to say, wait…
    Jamal Jafaar Mohammed’s seat in parliament gives him immunity from prosecution. Washington says he supports Shiite insurgents and acts as an Iranian agent in Iraq.
    Ah.

  51. The thing about the Burger King guy is that they didn’t have any non-tainted evidence — and didn’t think it was worth the effort to try to get any. Even with all that has been done to KSM, I don’t think we’d be anywhere near that problem.
    No one is saying, by the way, that he should be treated as if he was an American arrested in the United States. On the other hand, the life sentences effectively being doled out to people who are accused of doing very little — without trial or any other independent review of the evidence — isn’t really defensible based on fear that KSM will get out of jail.
    KSM is going to get a trial,* even if not in the first tranche. More than you can say for 350 (or so) other prisoners at GTMO.
    * It’s going to have rules of evidence, and real appellate review. Both of these things mean that in the marginal case, someone is going to ‘get off.’ It’s not going to be KSM, unless even I am wrong about the level of incompetence of the Admin.

  52. It’s not going to be KSM, unless even I am wrong about the level of incompetence of the Admin.
    It will nonetheless be interesting to see what *admissible* evidence the feds have. It may be much more circumstantial than anyone would guess.
    Not that we won’t convict him by hook or by crook, of course.

  53. This says it all about the National Review:
    “Jonathan, perhaps the reason you have seen only innuendo regarding the various law firms at Gitmo derives from the fact that the MSM is highly selective about which issues are worth investigating”
    The American Prospect, New Republic, and Nation run investigative stories that rely on actual reporting fairly often. The National Review prints innuendo without any support & blames this on the MSM’s failure to investigate.

  54. “Jonathan, perhaps the reason you have seen only innuendo regarding the various law firms at Gitmo derives from the fact that the MSM is highly selective about which issues are worth investigating”
    Perhaps the reason that we have seen only innuendo regarding NRO’s sponsorship of al Qaeda derives from the fact that the MSM is highly selective about which issues are worth investigating . . . Irresponsible speculation? It would be irresponsbile NOT to speculate
    See, this “argument from ignorance” stuff cuts both ways . . .

  56. May is just following in the footsteps of Denny Hastert
    You know, it is the same MO, but there is no way in hell that I want to see Hastert in a frumpy dress and support hose.
    Please cancel my earlier post.
    One would be Khalid Sheikh Muhammed.
    Yes, that would be one.
    Here’s what the magic magic wiki ball has to say.
    775 people have been held at GTMO. About 340 have been released. 110 of the rest are “ready for release”. Something more than 70 of the rest will face trial. Something like 250 will be held “indefinitely”.
    What about them?
    I don’t think anyone is calling for KSM to be treated as anything other than what he is. As it turns out, he’ll probably be treated better, in the sense of being granted a trial and some form of advocacy, than lots of folks who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
    Innocent people have been held, for years, with no opportunity to challenge their imprisonment. Some of them have been tortured. A lot of this has gone on with the full knowledge that these folks meant no harm to us, and presented no threat to us.
    That’s wrong, it’s illegal, and it’s morally repugnant. There’s not a lot of point trying to say otherwise.
    I understand your point about, for example, Sheik Mohammed. Nobody wants to see him walk because somebody forgot to read him his Miranda rights.
    The fact is that KSM will either be killed or he will spend the rest of his life slowly going nuts in a maximum security facility, just like Abdel-Rachman is, Lynne Stewart notwithstanding. He’s not going anywhere.
    What about all of the other guys rotting away in Cuba?
    I’m not trying to be confrontational here, but no matter how bad 9/11 was, it is simply not a license to grab whoever the hell we want, whenever we want, from wherever we want, and stuff them down a hole to do whatever the hell we want with them, for as long as we want, without having to answer to anyone about it.
    Nobody gets to do that. Not even us. I’d even say, especially not us.
    People’s lives are not our toys to do with as we will.
    Thanks –

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