Justice Prevails

by

by hilzoy

AP:

“A senior Pentagon official resigned Friday over controversial remarks in which he criticized lawyers who represent terrorism suspects, the Defense Department said.

Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said Charles “Cully” Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, told him on Friday that he had made his own decision to resign and was not asked to leave by Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Stimson said he was leaving because of the controversy over a radio interview in which he said he found it shocking that lawyers at many of the nation’s top law firms represent detainees held at the U.S. military prison in Cuba.

“He believed it hampered his ability to be effective in this position,” Whitman said of the backlash to Stimson’s comments.”

Gosh: I wonder how many of the major law firms he has impressed with his firm grasp of the basic principles of our judicial system and his unshakeable devotion to the rule of law will be lining up to hire him?

Heh heh.

35 thoughts on “Justice Prevails”

  2. It’s interesting–this comment of Stimson’s was awful but pretty low down on the list as far as terrible detainee policy. The bar is good at protecting its own, I guess. Not that they shouldn’t be–but it does tend to confirm my theory that they get away with the crap they do because even among liberals, we simply care less about what’s done to people who are less like us. Lock the Uighurs in solitary and there’s one Post story in the middle of the poster and a few blog posts; make a clumsy attempt to intimidate members of the Am Law 100 and all hell breaks loose.
    Needless to say this isn’t to defend Stimson or say that the firms doing pro bono work didn’t deserve for people to leap to their defense.

  3. He should have been fired. His prospects for a partnership at one of these firms are shot, I’m guessing he ends up working for a big defense contractor.

  5. I’m inclined to think he’ll have as much trouble landing a position as John Yoo did, or as any of the opinion writers who predicted success in Iraq currently have.
    Perhaps times have changed. But I strongly doubt that they have, that much, yet, at best. I don’t see, at worst, any lack of foundation positions, or perhaps academic ones (though not, perhaps, first-drawer), in Charles “Cully” Stimson’s future.

  8. Mellow greetings, Gary. I hope that things are going well with you, or at least not horribly unwell.

  9. “we simply care less about what’s done to people who are less like us”
    Not to argue against obvious human nature, but I think it’s in fact reasonable to be less upset about a crime against a few than a perversion of the system of justice that protects everyone.

  10. right, but the whole thing is a perversion of the justice system. How much attention are people paying to the al Marri case?

  11. (sorry, that was opaque–that’s the one where the suspension of habeas for noncitizens in the US is being hashed out before the 4th Circuit.)

  12. “right, but the whole thing is a perversion of the justice system”
    Naively I don’t see it as the same while it’s in the system; plus (same caveat) “US lawyers get to represent people in peace” seems more applicable to the normal functioning of the justice system than “non-citizens get a fair deal” – there’s a brighter line.

  13. Habeas is precisely about whether people are “in the system” at all, and they’ve been rolling a rock up a hill for five years and still not gotten a definitive ruling that it is. Were the detainees “in the system” before Rasul was decided? Yeah, they had a case, but they didn’t know it. The lawyers couldn’t mail them the complaint. And we could get back to that place.
    The system is deciding whether people are in the system, I suppose. That’s not that much comfort.
    If you’re talking about “a threat to people like me” maybe Stimson’s more of a threat but that’s precisely my point.

  14. All I meant was I assume that stuff will get to the SCOTUS and they’ll do something non-insane with it, and the govt threatening lawyers for doing work the govt dislikes is even more fundamentally dangerous (what good is habeas protection if one can’t get a lawyer? like us non-lawyers are going to rise up and figure out how to work that law magic on our own.)

  18. Ugh – my money is on fake. We’ve seen too many of these now – people pretending they were soldiers and they were there. It always turns out to be an imposter.
    If it turns out to be true I’ll be first in line for the crow casserole.

  19. There are also channels for reporting these things–even assuming that the internal channels won’t work, there are human rights investigators and press sources that can protect your anonymity, who you can learn about through word of mouth if you decide you want to go public. Fishback talked to McCain’s office…there are a number of ways to do this; risks in all of them, but why would you make a YouTube video? I can’t be certain, but when you combine that with the other factors–there are people who’ve reported on deaths in custody; I don’t remember any reports of women hanging themselves–I would be surprised if it’s accurate.

  20. What Katherine said. Obviously I don’t know whether it’s real or fake, but if I had to guess, I’m with fake.

  23. Wow – agreement with both Hilzoy AND Katherine. I would like a bookmark here folks. It may never happen again. (Seriously – I appreciate that you both smack down nonsense that would benefit your side when it is nonsense. Now to get my right-wing brethren on that same page…)

  24. “I appreciate that you both smack down nonsense that would benefit your side”
    Not to be surly in the face of a gracious sentiment, but American soldiers raping children doesn’t benefit my side, or my side of the argument, and I wouldn’t want to so benefit; and I should think the feeling would be the same for partisans on the other side if things were reversed.

  25. “How much attention are people paying to the al Marri case?”
    I can’t answer for “people,” but some of us read about it in places like the NY Times. Hit & Run is one blog following the case.
    I particularly appreciated this bit:

    Judge Motz indicated that the government’s shifting legal tactics in other cases had lost it a measure of credibility. It moved Jose Padilla, once labeled an enemy combatant, into the criminal justice system as the United States Supreme Court was considering whether to hear his challenge to that designation.
    “Often the government in these cases has a late-breaking development,” Judge Motz said. “Is there any late-breaking development here?”
    Mr. Salmons said no.

  26. A different question, that I wonder, is how many people are following how our government is treating another kind of detainee. (I know, I know, I need to get back to blogging; real soon now.)

    Ringed by barbed wire, a futuristic tent city rises from the Rio Grande Valley in the remote southern tip of Texas, the largest camp in a federal detention system rapidly gearing up to keep pace with Washington’s increasing demand for stronger enforcement of immigration laws.
    About 2,000 illegal immigrants, part of a record 26,500 held across the United States by federal authorities, will call the 10 giant tents home for weeks, months and perhaps years before they are removed from the United States and sent back to their home countries.
    […]
    But civil liberties and immigration law groups allege that out of sight, the system is bursting at the seams. In the Texas facility, they say, illegal immigrants are confined 23 hours a day in windowless tents made of a Kevlar-like material, often with insufficient food, clothing, medical care and access to telephones. Many are transferred from the East Coast, 1,500 miles from relatives and lawyers, virtually cutting off access to counsel.
    “I call it ‘Ritmo’ — like Gitmo, but it’s in Raymondville,” said Jodi Goodwin, an immigration lawyer from nearby Harlingen.
    An inspector general’s report last month on a sampling of five U.S. immigration detention facilities found inhumane and unsafe conditions, including inadequate health care, the presence of vermin, limited access to clean underwear and undercooked poultry.
    […]
    Accordingly, the United States has embarked on a huge prison building and contracting campaign, increasing the number of illegal immigrants detained from 19,718 a day in 2005 to about 26,500 now, and a projected 32,000 this summer.
    […]
    Detainees are subject to penal system practices, such as group punishment for disciplinary infractions. The tents are windowless and the walls are blank, and no partitions or doors separate the five toilets, five sinks, five shower heads and eating areas. Lacking utensils on some days, detainees eat with their hands.
    Because lights are on around the clock, a visitor finds many occupants buried in their blankets throughout the day. The stillness and torpor of the pod’s communal room, where 50 to 60 people dwell, are noticeable.
    Goodwin described a group of women who huddled in a recreation yard on a recent 40-degree day with a 25-mph wind. “They had no blanket, no sweat shirt, no jacket,” she said. “Officers were wearing earmuffs, and detainees were outside for an hour with short-sleeved polyester uniforms and shower shoes and not necessarily socks.”
    Perhaps more troubling, lawyers said, large numbers of immigrants have been transferred from Boston, New York, New Jersey and Florida, far from their families and lawyers. Because some immigration judges do not permit hearings by teleconference, detainees are essentially deprived of counsel.
    Immigration violators in the United States are held on civil grounds and have no right to appointed lawyers.

  27. It doesn’t really matter if it’s fake or not, Sy Hersh and the senators who’ve watched the tapes depicting screaming young boys being raped and women asking to be killed out of shame for what was done to them are credible enough sources.

  28. Not to be surly in the face of a gracious sentiment, but American soldiers raping children doesn’t benefit my side, or my side of the argument, and I wouldn’t want to so benefit; and I should think the feeling would be the same for partisans on the other side if things were reversed.
    I hadn’t considered that aspect of it – but given the political situation right now, something like this would be used to further a political agenda. Do you disagree?

  29. Yes, ‘my side’ has a political agenda: stopping or at least condemning torture and other human rights abuses. So sue me. Should ‘your side’ consist of people having voted for Bush and Rumsfeld after Abu Ghraib, then it doesn’t take a youtube video to destroy its credibility in this regard, because there is barely any left.

  30. OCSteve, sure, if by ‘further a political agenda’ you mean ‘further confirm an already well-established pattern of human rights abuses by U.S. personnel against Iraqi detainees, particularly in Abu Ghraib.’
    It’s exactly because that’s so well-established that no one is seizing on this video, which I also believe is fake. I think it’s a fake of a particular kind, one that Karl Rove has a word for.

  31. OCSteve: It might be used to further a political agenda. And I didn’t take your original comment to mean that that meant that anyone would welcome it.
    That said, if it could be used to serve a political agenda, then those who share that agenda might have two responses: (a) oh dear God, I hope that’s not true, for everyone’s sake, including not just the woman and the detainees but also the soldiers and our country; (b) yay, it advances my political agenda.
    Personally, I’d imagine that anyone but the most hardened political operative would go with (a), at least consciously, and that making sure one didn’t even unconsciously want it to be true is part of being a decent person interested in politics.

  32. And I didn’t take your original comment to mean that that meant that anyone would welcome it.
    Thanks for that anyway. I didn’t see the need to spell that out, but maybe I should have.

  33. Maybe I’ve got severe antisocial tendencies but when I worked in an asylum clinic, the worse conditions were in a country the better they were for your client. If the war criminal s/he were afraid of got out of prison, it helped your case. If the peace accord that ended the civil war looked like it was going to fall apart, it helped your case. If you found a report proving just how prevalent torture was in Haitian prisons, it helped your case. And vice versa. In that situation, I would catch myself thinking: “oh good!” when I found evidence that proved the point.
    For that matter, anything that corroborates an asylum seeker’s claim of past persecution shows that something horrible really did happen to him.
    So I flunk hil’s test I guess. But I didn’t really think it was good; I wasn’t really happy about those horrors obviously–it meant that I was happy I had found evidence that would prevent someone from having to go back to them. And certainly you are predisposed to believe evidence that helps your “case”, so to speak, and disbelieve evidence that proves the opposite.
    So I understand the temptation to that OCSteve is talking about to some extent–to believe the allegations even you don’t actually want those things to have happened.
    But OCSteve, even if one is purely cynical and agenda-driven about this, it’s an easy temptation to resist. Hyping evidence that isn’t true does a lot more harm than good in the long run. Compared to human rights groups, governments have more money, more power, more of every resource but one: credibility. It’s not something you want to squander to score some cheap points.

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