I understand your point on staying within a corrupt legal office, with knowledge of the corruption, in order to try to help the things over which you have control. In a non-law office setting, and in a situation involving generalized corruption, I would personally probably make a different choice but I could understand those who decide to stay on and try to make things better in quite a few settings.

But while a see lots of gray in many situations, I only see black and white, good and evil, and cause and effect in the situation of lawyers choosing to serve silent for publically acknowledged torturers. It’s not a tough call for me and as a result, it’s not a situation where I personally can pretend to respect the “other” choice made by the lawyers involved.

Do I think whistleblower “sold out” when they stayed on? Actually, yes. Maybe I have to make that “unequivocally” yes even. That doesn’t mean that my heart doesn’t break to hear Tamm interviewed and look at what he went through. LHP and I had a bit of “a talk” at one point bc she thought I was saying that any lawyer who didn’t become a whistleblower was worthy of contempt. That’s not what I meant, though. I would never be able to counsel a member of the intelligence community to BECOME a whistleblower, bc if you have their personal interests as your responsiblity, it’s far to risky.

But I do believe unequivocally that once you know that your “law firm” and your “law partners” are engaged in breaking the law and are using the firm as a part of the machinery of their crime, you have an affirmative duty to break your relationship. I can understand the whiffle/waffle of a situation where the DOJ, as such a large entity, has some people getting buy with and directing corruption, but it has not become the offical policy of the Dept and you are fighting to clean house by both handling your own work cleanly and becoming an internal firewall of sorts. I don’t believe in it as a course of action, but in many circumstances I can understand it and wouldn’t feel compelled to say I disagree with it and wouldn’t necessarily feel contempt for and disgust towards those who stayed the course. But the fact that they are lawyers in a joint cooperative legal association does, imo, make for a very different setting than other employees of agencies.

The bigger trigger for my very personal and very bitter and angry feelings in this situation, though, is that we aren’t just talking about “corruption” We are talking about torture and torturers. We are talking about acknowledged war crimes. We are talking about using the JUSTICE department to commit the unforgiveable. Whatever the private misgivings and how those were handled, the leaks of memos preceding and during the Gonzales confirmation hearings should, imo, have been the line crossed, the place where no lawyer with any decency stays on and silent. The surviellance program was awful too, and IMO should have provoked a similar reaction, but an opposite decision by a fine lawyer who was trying to right the course wouldn’t have made me angry and left me feeling like they have no place whatsoever in the profession.

Torture is a different creature though. Unlike a lot of this board, I’m a Christian and am happy to claim my faith and that no doubt influences my outlook. Anyone who can look at the crucifix and claim Christianity as a cloak, but work for torturers, is just unspeakable to me. Anyone who can, as a non-Christian, work for torturers is equally unspeakable (they just don’t provoke as personal and visceral a reaction from me). In any event, to me, once the Gonzales memos came out, coupled as they were with the prior Abu Ghraib revelations, any decent lawyer would have engaged in a public resignation, with letters to the editor as to why and with efforts to make others resign.

What leaves me totally chagrined is that lawyers who did not give one rats ass about torture and never did one thing to help the nation disavow it, have eagerly claimed a glory of bravery for being willing to resign – over something that the FISC was about to go after active participants in. Well goody for them. They still aided, abetted, and assented by silence to torture.

And the reason the nation is so rudderless imo has a tremendous amount to do with the disinterest of all of the lawyers of DOJ and administration to the Gonzales revelations. The United States Attorneys, AUSAs, lawyers for the CIA, the State Dept, the even the freakin EPA for Gods sake – they didn’t have any public reaction. So the lawyers entrusted with defending justice, the men and women that the bulk of the nation looks to for a barometer on what is right and what is wrong – all just went on about their business, publically at least, with no expression of any kind about the torture.

While there weren’t many voices of leaders on many things anywhere in the country for the last 8 years, at least there were some examples, here and there. A diplomat who resigned over the war, a lone Senator who voted against the Patriot Act – but where were the employees of DOJ who copied the papers on their letters of resignation, sent a public petition to the WH and Congress requesting that a torture advocate not be made AG, the offers to resign if torture was not investigated and prosecuted?

I don’t think that Fitzgerald or any other DOJ lawyer who stayed on after the public revelations of torture came out so much broke faith their oaths of office, as that they broke faith with their profession and humanity. With the result that a nation looking to its Justice Dept to see the response to the revelations saw – nothing. Nothing except assent and disinterest. Imagine if that had been what the nation saw when Nixon told his AG to fire the special prosecutor? A bootlicking acquiesence and otherwise silence. Would we be the same nation today? I don’t think so.

I’ve never taken advanced philosophy and semantics classes, so I probably wouldn’t argue the case well if it came up there. Would the nation be different if, once it was very definitely demonstrated (as it was by Gonzales’ Jan 2002 memo if nothing else, that there was a decision to commit acts that would be war crimes under the war crimes statute, but to move the locus of those acts to a place where a court would have a difficult time asserting jurisdiction and to bless those acts through DOJ exculpatory opinions) that the Executive branch was engaged in torture and was using the DOJ to launder the war crimes, if that revelation had provoked public resignations and protests at DOJ?

I don’t know. I can only give a less philosophical, biblical metaphor. It wouldn’t have taken a thousands, or hundreds or tens, even, to save Sodom.

One good man can do the right thing and it may end up all to no avail. But if no one chooses to do the right thing, there isn’t really any question left to be answered.

So it’s not so much a matter of breaking faith with an oath of office, it’s a matter of breaking faith with humanity.

So if the biblical story doesn’t resonate, I’ll try paraphrasing Arlo Guthrie instead:

You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he’s really sick and they won’t take him[seriously]. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they’re both faggots and they won’t take either of them[seriously]. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in [and saying I won’t work for torturers]and walking out. They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in [and saying I won’t work for torturers] and walking out. And friends they may thinks it’s a movement.

Well, *they* may have, but we’ll never know. Bc it never happened – it’s not just lyrics that start with One Person.

The article is about Alderman Pat O’Connor, a 5th district hopeful. The article states that Rahm “was believed to be leaning toward O’Connor, in part, because the alderman might be amenable to giving up the seat at some point.”

>A source with the Obama camp strongly denied Emanuel spoke with the governor directly about the seat, saying Emanuel only spoke with Blagojevich once recently to say he was taking the chief of staff post.

>But sources with knowledge of the investigation said Blagojevich told his aides about the calls with Emanuel and sometimes gave them directions afterward. Sources said that early on, Emanuel pushed for the appointment of Jarrett to the governor and his staff and asked that it be done by a certain date.

I’m amused by the URL, which ends rahm18good.article. Not sure whether this is editorializing in the URL … and if it is, are they saying “rahm good” or “good article”.

———————————————————————–

“Mary, Lab Dancer, William Ockham, EW you folks have helped this peasant understand and believe that there are folks with integrity in the system.

I thought at the end of the Libby trial Fitz hit the ball into congress’s court? Did they do everything they could do to open the gates even further for Fitz to get at Rove or Cheney?

and that goes directly to moral fiber, in my book

Marcy probably just lacks the information to make the case …

But if so, at least insofar as indicting Rove goes, I think that would far more likely go to one of Fitz’ [to me] apparent short-comings that to his integrity – and its integrity, I gather, that concerns Mary.

To clarify on my point about his not indicting Rove as constituting a poor exhibit to point to in drawing implications against his integrity:

Each of the charges that Libby ended up facing were based, and critically, to some degree or another, and in at least one and in several instances in more than one way, on what Libby said in interviews conducted by the FBI – at least one of which [both of which? Ms ew is Yoda on this] was conducted before Fitz was appointed by Comey – or what Libby said in response to questions asked by Fitz while they were before the Grand Jury – or both.

I defy anyone to go thru the two lengthy sessions Fitz had with Libby in front of the Grand Jury and NOT be positively impressed by:

[a] Fitz’ command of what Libby had said previously, and
[b] Fitz’ doggedness in not leaving Libby wiggle room on a number of points on which it turned out that Libby would be contradicted by testimony from others or by documentary evidence or both;

but at the same time, there were many instances where I think Fitz missed out on following up and therefore lost out on exploiting

[a] some things that Libby said in the first GJ session – which perhaps is somewhat foregivable, except that Fitz failed to return to the same ground after having reviewed the transcript from that first session, and after finally getting the picture cleared up from the testimony of Cooper certainly and to some degree Miller;

and

[b] some other things Libby said in the second GJ session, again partly by choosing against hauling Libby’s ass back in front of the GJ [on which there are some technical problems which may have stood in his way, I grant]

but

[c] spots in both sessions where Fitz simply failed to be anything nearly approaching as PRECISE as necessary in going after the LANGUAGE being used by Libby to obfuscate, and therefore failed to use employ anything like the doggedness he showed in areas that it appeared he’d mapped out in advance, or where he thought he and Libby were talking about the same thing.

Now, insofar as the goal of the exercise was to fry Libby’s ass, there’s a point where enough is enough, and I’m not going to argue that Fitz should have gone further in that when clearly he could have. However, that was not at ALL the goal of the exercise [I am not arguing Fitz ever misconceived or lost track of the proper goal: His last address to the jury at the Trial of Libby should suffice to dispel concerns about that.]

But what this tells me is this: If Fitz had communication problems with Libby – - someone who, with all due respect for Fitz, Diane Rehms was able to expose for what the basket case of weird neuroses and hangups he clearly is in what was for the most part a softball volunteer radio interview in the Happy Days part of the Bush administration – - those same limitations showed up again in his dealings with that fat slippery Rove, who specializes in keeping that “buff” physique apparently more or less upright while driving his extremities as hard as he can in several different directions simultaneously which shod in a pair of skates with over-lubricated ball bearings on their bottoms.

To give you an example of a prosecutor with a more fortuitous bent in taking on someone like Rove [besides suggesting my own small self, because I enjoyed doing it and I imagine I had my successes in that range, but who in hell ever really can judge their own strengths with any reliability, right?], I’m going to throw out someone you all know, or should: David Boies.

Most here will recall his work on the losing side in Bush v Gore 2000, but many may forget his quite astounding work in nailing Bill Gates in cross and thus MicroSoft for its systematically anticompetitive business plan and operations.

I’m not saying that Boies necessarily would be equipped as well as Fitz, who’s shown he’s got a pretty impressive bag of tools in a range that extends from taking down mobsters through terrorists through corporate fraudsters and corrupt pols. – frankly I think there are a number of cases where I’d far rather have a Fitz than a Boies on my side.

But I am saying that my impression is that Boies can do a number of things better, and some I think far better, than Fitz – - and that taking down an animal like Rove would be an example.

But again – that comes down partly to what the point of the exercise is – and in any event it’s really a function of the old saw: horses for courses – - neither of which has anything to do with bringing Fitz’ integrity into issue.

And when she does, I am convinced that her garment size will be considerably smaller than that of our grape-eating obscenity so hideously depicted by twolf’s genius.

And per WmOckham’s remark about Blago and the Children’s Hospital; indeed, it took me considerably less than a second when first I read the news to wish that vile cur a hundred years cleaning bedpans among ‘bald headed children’ undergoing chemo. Despicable.

Also, don’t forget the ability to work through judges, as well as elected officials.