8-02-05, 8:59 am

One lawyer is a smooth, handsome corporate attorney whose political loyalties, partisanship, and ideological moorings earned him a seat on the fast track to the top positions in corporations and now in the judicial branch of the US government.

The other lawyer is a mid-level Air Force officer, whose military career (and quite possibly his legal career) ended just as it flowered into his fifteen minutes of unwanted fame yesterday.

The smooth successful lawyer, John G. Roberts, was recently nominated to a lifetime position on the US Supreme Court. His White House sponsors disingenuously deny that Bush nominated Roberts because of his ideological disdain for basic things like civil rights, civil liberties, federal protections for the environment, voting rights, women’s rights, privacy, reproductive choice, and workers’ rights.

What Roberts’ qualifications are then, other than that he is smart – surely there are others who are smart who respect the Constitution – they refuse to say. In fact they refuse to let us read much of the man’s work to determine what is qualifications or disqualifications are. Roberts’ right-wing media supporters go so far in defending Roberts as to say that when he wrote motions and memos denouncing reproductive rights, defending anti-choice activists’ harassment of women entering clinics, or called for aggressive criticisms of members of the Reagan administration who more moderately opposed civil rights, he really didn’t mean it. He only wrote those motions and memos to present the opinions of the administration or to advise the administration in his capacity as a lawyer. He was merely representing a client and did so in the best way he knew how.

Are they hoping to use the image of the corrupt lawyer without principles to win support for Roberts? Remember this is the same set that argued that John Kerry couldn’t be president because he wasn’t wounded as seriously as he should have been during his service in Vietnam.

In their view, Roberts’ sycophantic, grasping personality, if indeed their description of him is accurate, makes him quality material for a lifetime position on the US Supreme Court. After all, Roberts’ integrity led him to misrepresent his membership in the secretive right-wing extremist lawyers’ association known as the Federalist Society. His values caused him to help Toyota argue that it didn’t need to compensate adequately many workers disabled at their plants. It was his service to justice that caused him to downplay the crimes committed during the Iran-Contra Affair.

The other lawyer in our parable made a major blunder. He told the truth. Unlike our first lawyer, he opened up and honestly spoke about his views and opinions. He didn’t hide behind the discredited rationalization that he did only what he was told do and therefore not responsible for his actions and words. He demolished the lawyer stereotype and apparently remained true to himself and the ideals of justice he deemed universal.

Major Robert Preston, according to press reports about recently leaked classified Pentagon documents, acknowledged to be authentic by the Pentagon, wrote an e-mail to one of his superior officers describing what he thought about his role as a prosecutor in the military tribunals invented by the Bush administration and held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to bring international terror suspects to 'trial.'

Preston wasn’t interested in advancing his career by sucking up to his superiors, as our first lawyer apparently has been. Preston was more interested in clearing his conscience and denouncing a travesty of justice.

In his e-mail, Major Preston described the Bush administration tribunals as a 'fraud on the American people' and a 'fairly half-arsed effort.' He said, 'I consider the insistence on pressing ahead with cases that would be marginal even if properly prepared to be a severe threat to the reputation of the military justice system.' He pointed out that after holding some suspects for years, the tribunals were prepared to find suspects guilty even when the cases against them were 'marginal.'

He described working in such an environment as weighing heavily on his conscience. It kept him awake at night and unable to focus on his work. 'After all,' he concluded, 'writing a motion saying that the process will be full and fair when you don’t really believe it is kind of hard, particularly when you want to call yourself an officer and lawyer.'

Major Preston’s account is confirmed by a second prosecutor who also is no longer working at Guantanamo, Captain John Carr. 'When I volunteered to assist with this process and was assigned to this office, I expected there would at least be a minimal effort to establish a fair process and diligently prepare cases against significant accused,' Carr wrote.'Instead, I find a half-hearted and disorganised effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly low-level accused in a process that appears to be rigged.'

I wonder which Bush/Rove/Roberts protege is furiously writing motions and memos vigorously defending the 'fraud' at Guantanamo, hoping for the next big opening on the federal judiciary.

I say, dump Roberts. Major Robert Preston for Supreme Court justice.



--Reach Leo Walsh at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.