How the Law Lost Out to Laws of Politics at the Justice Department

[babylonsister]

How the Law Lost Out to Laws of Politics at the Justice Department
by Elizabeth Sullivan

snip//

As Goldsmith notes, “In Washington, geography is one of the currencies of power.” And after running the OLC for nine months in 2003 and 2004, Goldsmith, now a Harvard law professor, saw for himself how the OLC’s inhibited access worked:

The “law” became more about expedience and access and less about careful, factual opinions. A cadre of insiders, led by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and the sharp-tongued David Addington, legal counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney, were the “war council” who vetted legal opinions, in place of Ashcroft and his staff.

As long as OLC lawyers loyally stretched arguments to cover executive branch wants and potential excesses with poorly argued pseudo opinions, things piped along.

When the lawyers weren’t quite so cooperative — as happened after Goldsmith took over in October 2003 — the results were name-calling and other forms of intimidation until a new legal lapdog could be found.

Goldsmith doesn’t use the word “lapdog” in his book — probably because the lapdogs were his friends. He blames their poor legal reasoning on the constant tap of fear after 9/11 that drove many to try to stretch legal constraints to have the maximal impact on the hunt for terrorists.

He wasn’t willing to do quite the same. It turns out Goldsmith’s conservatism wasn’t political — just as his legal opinions on torture and secret surveillance of U.S. citizens and Guantanamo weren’t for hire.

more...

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/07/4377/